Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  When they were equipped to his requirements and ready to leave the army camp, one of the two men he had recruited to assist him asked, “Why don’t we just bust our way out of here?”. They were sitting in the rear seats, the position of the gunner and commander, with strict instructions not to touch anything as Michaels drove.

  “Because,” he said, dragging out the word into the headset that linked them over the rumble and roar of the engine and tracks, “we don’t want anyone to know we’ve been here, and if we need to come back it would be nice if the place wasn’t full of dead people because some idiot drove through the gate instead of opening it. Dickhead.”

  So they had left the camp and the nearby ammunition dump as though nobody had been there, and when the army had returned, they failed to notice the missing vehicle and the ammunition taken from the rearmost sections away from the entrance.

  Now that Warrior, that dominant vehicle that was impervious to almost anything other than the mighty Chieftain tanks miles away down the coast, sat hidden in the ruins of the old fort, partially obscured by a collapsed wall of heavy stone, and camouflaged the rest of the way using cut branches. Unless anyone approaching in a vehicle knew it was there, they would be well within deadly range of the 30mm cannon for far too long to make any assault anything other than a bloodbath or one-sided losses.

  They were nestled in, and they had no intention of being dug out.

  THIRTEEN

  The first morning they woke up together, the two children sat up and looked at each other awkwardly. They had slept remarkably well given the tumultuous events of the previous day, but the morning air was chilly thanks to the small, high window they had left open during the night.

  They hadn’t noticed the cold when they slept wrapped up inside a double duvet each, but now that they were out of those cocoons they shivered in the cool air. Still, the cost of leaving that window open was repaid by what it had brought back to them in the darkness.

  The yellow eyes, the black and brown mottled fur and its eager, expectant look; the cat stood and stretched up to arch its back, before sitting down and turning its head far to the right to desperately lick behind its own shoulder blade, then stopping just as rapidly to look at them again.

  Peter and Amber looked at each other, both wearing small smiles, then back at the cat, who regarded them with its big eyes that closed in slow blinks as the loud rattle of a purr wound itself back up to full volume. Amber held a single finger out to it, giggling as the cat pushed itself forward to rub the entire length of its left side along the digit and spin delicately in front of her face to look at Peter.

  This had the unwelcome side effect of placing its back end with the upturned tail directly in Amber’s face and making her lean back to move her eyes away from the display. They both laughed softly, and the cat looked at them both in turn to show them it was unimpressed to the extent that it was almost ashamed of them.

  Peter had never had a cat, mostly because any cat hanging around the farm would be seen as food by the working dogs that walked obediently at the heels of their masters. He decided that he liked this cat, as presumptuous and intrusive as it was, and held out his own finger towards it. Shuffling the position of all four paws, it carefully balanced to reach out one paw and try to span the expanse between the two settees to step across.

  Try as it might, it had no possible way of extending a single paw to bridge the gap of at least two feet and still make it, but that didn’t stop the ridiculous, wobbling display of balance until the realisation finally dawned on it and it stepped lightly down to leap back up on Peter’s side, and purr loudly as it snaked its body up and down his hand. Both children smiled at the display, not realising that they were being manipulated into providing more food, just as they had done the previous night.

  From the cat’s perspective, two people had arrived and didn’t scream at it and try to catch it, and they fed it. The biggest draw for the cat was that these two, even if they were small, were warm and smelt like people instead of dead things.

  Peter stood and stretched, slipping his arms into a sweatshirt that was too big for him after being liberated from a house he couldn’t remember being inside. He stepped lightly over the cold floor of the kitchen and looked over the contents arrayed on the worktop, as he always did when he cleared a house. He found tinned meatballs, cans of soup that promised to be thick and creamy, and dried pasta.

  He thought, then stepped quickly and quietly to the stairs, where he carefully peered through the windows front and back to be sure that there were no monsters loitering in the street. He couldn’t be sure if any of the houses were nests, like the two he had discovered by bad luck, and only survived through a moment of good luck, but a decent indication of those places was a wide-open front door.

  Deciding to risk it, as he was now bizarrely responsible for not only a kid but apparently a cat too, he returned to the kitchen and ran a pan of water from the tap. When the pan was half-full, the water began to cough and splutter from the pipe as though air were trapped in there somehow, and then it stopped altogether. Peter set down the pan and frowned.

  Going through the cupboards, he found another container and went to the other tap in the house in the main bathroom upstairs. He managed to fill most of that smaller pan, which in itself was deceptive, since being smaller, it held much less water anyway, and he carried it carefully downstairs.

  Amber was watching him in silence, crossing her legs and leaning forward to wear a look of discomfort. Peter saw this, recognised the look, and in that same moment realised that the girl had been conditioned into this violent new world and would not pee without being told it was safe to do so. He held out a hand to her, beckoning her towards him, and pointed her towards the toilet.

  “Just don’t flush it,” he murmured to her.

  Peter had faced that quandary himself in the early days. He had flushed the toilet out of habit alone in the first house he had occupied, and was rewarded with three callers at his door within as many minutes. He’d stolen silently out of the back door and reminded himself not to do that again.

  A week later he decided to try another method and peed in a bucket instead. Through trial and error at a couple of houses, he came to study the effects that his bodily functions had on his survivability, and found that the smell of fresh urine outside was about as sensible as flushing the toilet, but if he kept the bucket inside and tipped it into the toilet carefully, or just used the toilet without flushing, then neither the smell nor the noise would bring unwanted attention.

  Suffering the eye sting of ammonia from his own pee was an easy trade-off when balanced against having his body torn apart and eaten by people.

  Turning on the gas to the stove, he stepped back and struck a long match before leaning his body away to light the burner. It caught with a whoomph and he instinctively shook the match in his hand before dropping the smoking stem of thin wood into the sink. He boiled the water, intermittently checking beyond the drawn curtains to be sure that nothing had detected the subtle atmospheric change caused by a pan of water boiling, and he watched Amber from the corner of his eye as she fussed the cat, who was still trying to encourage her to feed it. He tested the pasta, scalding his fingers as he pulled a single piece from the pan to chew it, deciding that it was soft enough. He drained it with some difficulty, then replaced the pan on the burner and opened a can of meatballs to tip the contents in and stir it messily around with a wooden spoon.

  When that had warmed through and begun to sizzle and catch on the bottom of the metal, he turned off the gas and let the pan rest while he found two wide china bowls in an off-beige colour with a ringed flower pattern encircling the lip. He selected them a spoon each and set the table, then opened another tin of cat food and used a fork to spread half of the contents out on a small plate of the same pattern and colour.

  As soon as the can opener had made its unique sounds on the tin of meatballs, the cat abandoned Amber as though she no longer existed, steppin
g away so suddenly and without even a glance of farewell that the girl deflated. It jumped up on the kitchen worktop and made itself a nuisance until the cat food was presented on the plate, then followed the boy like he held in his hand cat ambrosia. Peter placed the cat’s dish on the kitchen table at the head and pulled out a chair before beckoning Amber over. They sat up and ate their mostly-cooked breakfast of meatballs and pasta shells with the thin tomato sauce barely covering their portions as the cat ate noisily, sitting up at the table with them.

  It purred as it chomped on the chunks of unidentifiable smelly goodness and jelly, making more sound than both children combined as they slurped their own food. The cat finished first, despite its repeat of the ventriloquist act and remained sitting up to lick its paws and wash its face, while it seemed to wait for the others to finish. Amber became full fairly quickly, as did Peter, who had survived for a month on snacking, and some days didn’t get to eat for hours and hours on end if the houses he had chosen to rest in were poorly stocked with tinned goods.

  Peter rose to take the dishes away, using plates to cover their bowls for the rest to be eaten later when they had room in their bellies. The cat seemed to have room for more and meowed pitifully at him as he stood in the kitchen, until he relented and scraped out the remainder of the tin and chopped it up with a fork.

  The cat licked the jelly off a chunk for less than half a minute, then abruptly turned and flashed the circle of light skin at the base of its tail in Peter’s direction as it got down and trotted to the settee, where it jumped up without invitation to knead Amber’s legs through the duvet again.

  You didn’t want food then, Peter thought in annoyance, you just wanted me to feed you.

  He cleaned up in the kitchen, leaving the dirty pans in the sink and reorganising the supplies he had found in the cupboards, before returning to his settee. The cat, curled into a neat circle with paws and tail tucked in, raised its head and opened both eyes to glare at him as he sat down. Peter was taken aback by the unexpected look of hostility, and watched with his mouth partly open as the cat jumped down and stretched before walking to the kitchen and jumping up to look at the open window as it calculated the precise physics of the intended stunt. Leaping up and wobbling in balance on the frame, it dropped outside and disappeared once more to leave them alone.

  Amber looked saddened by the animal’s exit, but she expected the cat to return in its own time. The two of them sat in silence until their boredom made them fidget and somehow feed off each other’s inactivity. Peter cracked first, standing up to begin a more thorough search of the house for something to do. Again he arrived at an assumption about the woman who lived there; she must have catered for having kids visiting her occasionally. Perhaps she was an aunt and saw something in a charity shop one day to keep by for when nieces or nephews visited, but the faded and yellowed cardboard of the box made him smile.

  He took it back and sat on the carpet between the settees, smiling at Amber as she watched what he had in his hands expectantly. He lifted off the lid, feeling that sticky dryness where old sellotape had yellowed more than the once-white cardboard beneath. He shook the box lightly, pouring out the stiff pieces of the game and arranging them on the carpet, where Amber slid down from her seat to join him.

  They played in silence, after Amber had shown Peter how to play the game using a simple demonstration. The girl had still not spoken a word since the previous night, and Peter had given up trying to get her to talk, assuming that she would speak to him in her own time if and when she was ready. They played the game, filling their plates with the good food and rejecting the bad as they made each other laugh quietly by pulling disgusted comedy faces at the worms and mud on the cards they picked.

  “Aww, tummy ache,” Amber said softly when she had collected a full plate of bad food. The sound made Peter jump, and he chose then to ask her what had happened.

  “Was that your mum?” he asked her, “the woman with you in the other house?”

  Her face dropped, and her eyes glazed over instantly. She nodded slowly then began to cry. Tears ran from both eyes and her bottom lip quivered uncontrollably. Peter leaned over to her and put a hand on the carpet beside her. She put her own hand on the top of his as he spoke.

  “Don’t cry,” he told her, “I’ll look after you.”

  He kept his hand there, leaning awkwardly forwards until she decided to break the contact. Just then, they both snapped their heads towards the kitchen as a half-familiar sound erupted there. The cat dragged itself back inside the open window and dropped down to trot over to the scene without recognising the important emotions on display. With its tail held vertically, it stepped lightly between them and nuzzled Amber’s face and began to purr again.

  “Sir,” Johnson said in simple greeting as Captain Palmer nodded to him from the map he was hunched over. He had been summoned to assist in mission planning and walked in at the same time as Lieutenant Lloyd, who had his sleeves rolled up and his green beret worn proudly.

  “Gentlemen,” Palmer said to the assembled men, including three of the four navy pilots, “good morning. As you know, the powers that be are planning to send us some more assets and supplies.” He held up a hand to stem the flow of questions from three of the men.

  “I know, we have our priorities and they have theirs,” Palmer said to change the subject away from the circuitous conversations they had already had, “They are going to give us a CO,” he said with an uncommon touch of annoyance creeping into his voice, “and his own admin team, as well as some other military assets which they have been very tight-lipped regarding,” he added, leaving the intimation clear in the room.

  “Sneaky-beaky stuff, Sir?” Lloyd asked. His own status as leader of elite infantry would be knocked down the ladder should someone more elite be ordered to their island.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Lieutenant,” Palmer said, “but that isn’t the priority for today. If we are sent any specialist troops, I doubt they would fall under our domain anyway. For now, we are tasked with planning and executing a mission some sixty miles inland to escort an engineering team to and from a target.”

  Looks were exchanged but everyone kept quiet to wait for the rest of the information.

  “You may have noticed, gentlemen,” Palmer went on, “that, as disciplined as we are being, our lights are still on.” He looked around the room to see the admission on their faces that they hadn’t considered that fact so often taken for granted. To keep from attracting any unwelcome and cannibalistic attention, they had been operating good light discipline and only using lights that couldn’t be seen from the outside. That prompted the central switch for the streetlamps on the island to be switched permanently off, and this led them to live their lives mostly in the dark anyway, so the lights remaining off wasn’t that noticeable.

  “That is courtesy of a nuclear power station, and yes, you guessed it, sixty miles inland,” Palmer finished.

  “Where’s the engineering team coming from?” Lieutenant Commander Barrett asked.

  “America,” Palmer answered simply.

  Lieutenant James Morris, Barrett’s co-pilot smiled and affected a Brit’s attempt at a southern states accent and said, “Now, wwhhut can they teach us about our own power station?”

  “A good deal, I should imagine,” piped up a nasal voice from behind the navy pilots as Second Lieutenant Palmer walked in to hand a sheet of paper to his older brother, “seeing as they designed and built it for us about ten years ago.”

  Johnson’s eyebrows lowered slightly as he fought against the natural urge to narrow his eyes in suspicion that the most junior officer was in possession of information that the others had not yet been given. The balance of power was tentative, although the officer classes were too polite to mention the vulgarity of who should be in charge, as the navy pilots were army equivalent ranks of majors and captains themselves. Command of ground activities, however, had been devolved to Palmer as the most qualified. For all the
men present, all of them were very aware that the Captain’s younger brother was tolerated under sufferance only due to his older brother, just so long as he didn’t get in the way of anything. For him to swan into a senior officers’ meeting and act as he did set every spine in the room firmly on edge.

  “Thank you, Second Lieutenant,” Captain Palmer said with a chilly tone of official annoyance, then scowled gently at his brother’s back as he left the room. He was too well bred to offer an apology for his sibling’s words, so he continued to explain.

  “The yanks have sent a carrier,” he said, his expression meaning nothing derogatory as he clearly had an affinity with the Americans after working with them in Germany, “and they’ve apparently pre-empted our nuclear needs. They built two for us, and they believe that both of them will be at risk of overheating or some such problem in the near future. We need to get them there safely, clear out the place, then keep them safe until they can stabilise the reactors and do some kind of witchcraft with cooling.”

  Lieutenant Commander Murray whistled low, looking to his naval colleagues, who seemed to understand. He saw the two army men looking at them expectantly and explained.

  “If the Americans have sent a carrier, that must mean they’ve sent an entire carrier strike group,” he said, seeing that this news still hadn’t sunk in.

  “That means a carrier,” he said as he checked off on one finger, “at least one destroyer, a pair of frigates, half a dozen support ships and,” he glanced at the other pilots, “a nuclear attack sub.”

  Then it sunk in, and their faces showed fresh nervousness.

  “Any word from the Soviets?” Johnson asked in an uncharacteristically taut voice.

  “Nothing,” Palmer said with equable seriousness, “and nothing from the Chinese either. It appears that Communism doesn’t want to speak to Democracy, even when hell empties and all the devils are here.”