Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  “Where are we going, Sir?” one of the army men asked him.

  “Up,” he answered, racking the bolt to seat another bullet, ready to fire in his rifle after reloading. “Bring as many people as we can along the way, but the island is lost.”

  To the credit of each man there, none of them showed

  anything but a grim and determined resolve to survive. They were cut off, the enemy was among them, and they had to fight.

  SIX

  “Send,” Palmer snapped into the radio handset, then frowned as he listened to the response. Johnson watched his face, not liking what he saw, and glanced to the only other man present who was privy to the information.

  Corporal Daniels, normally a steady man, looked ashen. His mouth opened slightly, his eyes went vacant and he trembled. Johnson looked back to the Captain.

  “Understood,” he said simply in a voice that sounded hollow and final, “good luck. Out.”

  He handed the handset back to Daniels, having to nudge the man in the shoulder with it to bring him back to his senses and take the offered equipment.

  “SSM, the island is…” he paused, swallowing, “the island is cut off. There was a shore bombardment from the navy, and unfortunately it brought the bridge down with the loss of one of our MBTs.”

  Johnson slumped back in the too-small chair and looked aghast. The loss of the main battle tank was a huge blow, but the bridge being brought down was their worst-case scenario. They couldn’t fight their way back home, nor could their reinforcements come to their aid; any vehicle left on the island was staying there.

  “It gets worse, I’m afraid,” Palmer said as he rubbed his face, fingers scratching on the fair stubble of his cheeks. “The virus is loose there. There’s an outbreak, and I fear that very few of them are going to make it out.”

  That news, and the sinking realisation with it, dropped Johnson’s heart straight down through his guts. For some bizarre reason he couldn’t fathom, his thoughts went to the attractive woman who inexplicably wanted to get to know him. These thoughts came to him in a flash, much faster than time passed, as though the feelings and thoughts all arrived at once and were decoded instantly in his mind. He guessed she would never get the chance to know him now, and he regretted his guarded responses to her questions all those hours ago when they had enjoyed a companionable drink with Maxwell and his wife.

  Maxwell, he thought selfishly as he tried to find a way to tell him, Shit, Denise! The kids!

  Palmer seemed to read his thoughts and held up a hand to stop the question before it was formed in Johnson’s mouth.

  “Yes, most of the men have people there, have family, myself included…” he said, making Johnson feel a small stab of regret for the junior Lieutenant, not out of sadness for losing the man, but for the pain that loss would bring his older brother. Even more wretchedly, he realised that sadness wasn’t for any regretful loss of life, but for the fact that it would make their officer less efficient. He let the silence hang heavy for a moment before the Squadron Sergeant Major cleared his throat and asked a simple question.

  “What are our orders, Sir?”

  Palmer turned slowly to regard him, his face morphing out of stunned sorrow and back into something infinitely more tempered by professionalism, and his words sounded confident and resolved.

  “Ammo count, half of the guns cleaned at once,” he said, dishing out administrative tasks that levelled the men with familiar activity, “Assault Troop to recce south for high ground and try and observe the island,” he said, and then remembered that Assault Troop was down to a single vehicle and a scattering of men among the other vehicles. “Cancel that. Send a pair of Foxes.”

  Johnson nodded, then rose to pull himself out of the open hatch above. He was on the verge of reminding the Captain that they only had one single Spartan of Assault Troop left, and no wagon ever rolled on its own, but the man had evidently recalled the facts and changed the order. The only foreseeable problem with the amended orders was a mechanical one; the Fox, as well armed as it was, performed like it was made of chocolate when asked to go off-road with any meaning.

  He gave his orders to Strauss, one of the few men without family locally, and hence unburdened by the weight of the news Johnson was forced to keep to himself for the time being. He gave the orders, mixed with part of the information, that the bridge was down, and sent the two crews off to find the high cliffs overlooking the rock that used to be their temporary home.

  As he walked back towards the command vehicle, the tall man wearing black clothing and dripping in non-standard weaponry cut across his path.

  “Sarn’t Major,” he greeted him.

  “Sir,” Johnson answered.

  “I wonder if you’ve had any joy contacting your base?”

  Johnson looked over both shoulders and lifted his chin in the direction of the Sultan. The SAS men had only a personal radio set which required complex setting up, differing lengths of antennae, the blood of a unicorn and a bucket brimming with good luck to make it work sometimes, whereas their command vehicle had three sets permanently working.

  “Best you come and speak to the Captain, Sir,” he said ominously.

  Downes listened to Palmer’s report wearing a blank look. His bright eyes oozed alertness, but his expression and features remained stock-still and emotionless.

  “You still have RN aircraft there?” he asked, meaning the

  navy helicopters, one of which had only recently removed their precious cargo and half of the special forces soldiers.

  “Unable to raise them,” Palmer said, “one would hope they are evacuating personnel…”

  “Indeed,” Downes responded before changing the subject, “what’s your redundancy?”

  Palmer looked shocked, mainly because he hadn’t considered abandoning the island and resorting to occupying a back-up location, at least not without proof that the island was beyond their help. His lack of answer gave Downes the information regardless.

  “In the absence of orders from command and any viable way to assist anyone left at base, you will need to consolidate,” Downes said. “I would suggest that we form up in sight of the base and prepare to receive any additional personnel via helicopter, but after that it is our duty to remain operational.”

  Palmer viewed him as coolly as he could, fighting the urge to snap at the senior officer out of fear and frustration. He kept his head level and his eyes fixed when he answered.

  “Are you assuming control of the men, Sir?” he asked formally, leaving a tense and awkward silence.

  “No, Captain,” Downes said with a small smile intended to appease the younger man, “I am not. Merely making a suggestion.”

  “Very well,” Palmer said, returning the smile to show that his hostility was fleeting, “I’ve deployed two wagons to get sight of the island, and we will wait for their report. Anything else you need, Sir?”

  “No, Captain, just shout us if you need us.”

  With that, Downes climbed up and out of the Sultan awkwardly, showing them that he was not used to travelling in an armoured squadron. Palmer turned back to Daniels as soon as the

  sound of his boots hitting the rocky ground outside floated in through the open hatch.

  “Corporal, keep trying the island. Use the RN and marine frequencies too if you can,” he said, watching as Daniels snatched up a piece of paper that had numbers scribbled in pencil on it from where he had wedged it beside his radios, “and let me know as soon as One Troop provide a report.”

  “Well?” Mac asked Downes as he ducked back inside the open rear door of the Saxon.

  “Well, their base is cut off, looks like the navy tried to help and accidentally blew the bridge,” he waited as the snorts of derision rippled around his three men, “and they can’t raise anyone on comms to see if they are flying them out, because there’s an outbreak on the island. Fuck knows where this is going.”

  He let them assimilate the new information in their own time, copying t
heir actions of refilling spent magazines from the big bag of bullets laid out between them. That bag, as heavy as it must have been, had been strapped to Mac’s back the entire time they had been deployed, as though it weighed nothing.

  “And us?” Dez asked as he thumbed bullets into the metal and compressed the spring.

  “Nothing from central command yet, they’re still trying, and unless we use their Sultan to re-bro us, then I doubt we’ll have much luck ourselves,” Downes answered, meaning the Yeomanry’s ability to re-broadcast the communications from their man-portable radios through the command vehicle and increase the reliability ten-fold.

  “Are they just not getting through,” Mac asked in his characteristically grim tone, “or are they not answering us?”

  “I don’t know,” Downes said pensively, “but I don’t like it.”

  The Bell helicopter carrying the two engineers and the two surviving Norwegians flared in to scrape its skids on the deck of the dull grey American vessel, the USS Mearle, beside the taller, bulbous airframe of a Royal Navy Sea King. Deck crew wearing their different coloured helmets ran low towards them and helped the four passengers down.

  “Captain wants to see you two,” shouted one man, pointing behind himself at a sealed doorway leading inside. Astrid glanced up at Berg’s face, seeing nothing betrayed in his stony expression. Technically they didn’t fall under anyone’s command, but with the situation as it was, any senior leadership still active under the NATO banner took authority of troops they found stranded or abandoned with them. The two Norwegians walked towards the doorway and into the gloomy interior without looking back to the engineers, one of whom was growing pale and had broken out in a sweat.

  The ship was a hive of well-run efficiency, with people teeming the decks and everyone working like ants to play their own small part in keeping the destroyer operating at maximum capacity. The arrival of two civilian nuclear engineers on a non-nuclear warship was of such little importance that nobody noticed them. Nobody noticed the pale man stagger slightly as his feet hit the deck, not even his fellow engineer, and his arrival went totally undetected.

  He followed the lead, winding his way across the flat top of the landing space, and bounced heavily off the doorway to crash bodily into the bulkhead inside.

  “Hey, buddy,” said a sailor approaching them, “you okay, man?”

  “Yeah,” he gasped as he tried to stand and smile to show he was fine, “just feeling a little queasy, you know?”

  “Ah,” the sailor responded with a grin, “you’ll get your sea-legs soon, don’t sweat it.”

  The engineer smiled weakly again, stood upright, then rolled his eyes back into his head and pitched backwards to slam unconscious into the deck.

  “Okay, how long has he been out?” asked the diminutive doctor as he strode into the treatment bay in the ship’s medical department.

  “Only a few minutes,” said the sailor who had bodily carried him there to save time, “reckons he was seasick or something.”

  The doctor placed one hand on the engineer’s forehead and frowned.

  “Seasickness doesn’t usually cause a fever, sailor,” he said, then announced more loudly to his medically personnel, “I need IV fluids and get these clothes cut off. We can’t rule out infection.”

  “Infection?” the sailor asked, wearing a suddenly worried look on his young face and taking an involuntary step backwards.

  “The first sign of this virus,” the doctor explained as he was helping to strip the man, “is a raised temperature. After that it varies, depending on the severity of the injury. Get me a vitals monitor on, somebody?” he called out to the room.

  The sailor carried on backing away, mumbling something about returning to his duty, and left the engineer to have his clothes cut away from his body. Heavy shears chomped at the thick material covering his legs to reveal pale flesh. The doctor had recognised his pallor and ordered the fluids as a first measure to prevent the man going into shock. Checking every part of his

  body meticulously, the only break in the man’s skin was in the form of a small graze at his elbow. The injury was less than superficial, but the swollen, angry red skin around it screamed infection. He checked the graze closely, unable to find anything resembling a bite mark, and chewed his lip in thought.

  “Okay, I need two hundred ccs of IV antibiotics, flush it through with saline and keep the fluids going. This man has a severe infection, but it doesn’t appear to be that infection,” he announced as he stepped back and peeled off his surgical gloves. He left the treatment room to return to his other patients, feeling satisfied that he had averted disaster for the time being.

  The engineer, unconscious and having already spoken his last words, burned up from the inside. The combined spittle and blood from the last zombie Astrid had dispatched after Christian Berg had driven them all to the ground had soaked his shirtsleeve and leaked into the open cut on his arm and infected him. The severity of the infection was lessened by the means, but the end result was just as inexorable as if his throat had been bitten out.

  The doctor had been called back in and had ordered an ice bath to be used to try and break the fever and prevent damage to the brain. No amount of medication or any other intervention had brought the man’s temperature down, and his convulsions raged intensely for half a minute until he went suddenly still. Paddles were charged as the man was hauled unceremoniously out of the ice bath and dried off desperately, but they were too late to save his life.

  “Time of death,” the doctor said, glancing up at the clock on the bulkhead, “eighteen-thirty-two. Someone find out who he was, and I’ll inform the Captain.”

  SEVEN

  “Welcome aboard the Mearle,” announced the tall, almost gangly man who rose from his command chair on the bridge. The two FSK commandos stood rigid for a moment, seemingly all that would pass for a salute to the American, and he shrugged as if to convey that he didn’t expect anything more. His gaze lingered on Astrid for a half-second longer than he had regarded Berg.

  “I’m Captain Alder, this is Commander Briggs from the British Navy,” he said, indicating another tall, thin man who had risen and now offered a hand to them.

  “Royal Navy,” he corrected the American, who shrugged again and allowed one corner of his mouth to lift in a small smirk.

  “Your report?” Alder asked them as he retook his seat. Berg glanced at Larsen, who raised her eyebrows slightly before responding.

  “Chto vy dumayeshe?” Astrid muttered to Berg quietly in informal Russian, as they often did when they didn’t want to be understood by others.

  Berg answered her question of, ‘What do you think?’ with a shrug of his own, meaning that he saw no reason to withhold anything.

  “What do you know of our mission?” she asked, ever careful and secretive.

  “Assume I know everything up to you getting there,” Alder responded in a tone that indicated he had no time left for need-to-know matters. Astrid kept her face neutral as she cursed the arrogance of the man inside the safety of her own thoughts.

  “We suffered fifty percent fatalities during insertion,” she began in deadpan but perfect English, “we cleared the objective and protected the engineers as they shut down the plant. We were extracted.”

  Captain Alder, clearly annoyed at the brevity of the report, needled her with his next question.

  “Too many of the infected there for you?”

  “No,” she snapped back, a little too quickly and forcefully and betraying her raw nerves about it, “there was a parachute malfunction which caused our commander to land at terminal velocity. On his way in he caught the rig of our other man and tangled him up. He survived the landing but was caught up. They started eating his legs, so he shot himself in the head.”

  Alder took his turn to keep a neutral face and dropped the goading in an instant.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Well done on completing the mission. Get some food and rack time and we’ll see about g
etting you home, but we’ve got more than enough to be getting on with here. Dismissed.”

  Both commandos stiffened again and turned away, seeing the sympathetically smiling face of Commander Briggs. He finished polishing the lenses of his glasses on the tail of his black uniform tie and gestured for them to follow him out of the bridge.

  “We are a little overcrowded here, as is everyone in the joint fleet, I should imagine. There’s food being served in the galley and I’m sure you’ll be able to find somewhere suitable to rest your heads for a while if you wish,” he said almost apologetically as though he was unable to be as gracious a host as he could be.

  “You are English, so why are you here?” Berg asked in an enquiring tone so direct that it bordered on rude.

  “I was attached as an aide between Her Majesty’s forces and our American allies,” Briggs answered blankly, as though he wanted to say more but was simply too well-mannered and polite to voice his opinion. They followed him in silence until he had shown them the head, galley and an area that was used for makeshift beds which were little more than a thin mattress and some stiff blankets. They still carried their weapons, which

  under normal circumstances would have raised eyebrows or even attracted challenges, but it seemed that every third person they saw had a sidearm on their belts or even carried long guns. They ate, at least they put some stodgy form of food inside their bodies out of nothing more than an ingrained need to stay fully effective, and then they found a quiet corner to clean their weapons.

  Which they had no idea they would need far sooner than expected.

  The engineer, pale and naked on a metal gurney in the medical, opened his eyes. They weren’t the eyes he had previously seen through, in fact he could barely see a thing, not that he could comprehend anything he saw through them anyway. The eyes were milky orbs, his skin remained deathly pale and his right hand twitched in unison with his fluttering eyelids.