Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  Their strange amalgamation of mixed armed services personnel and civilians rescued from the area had evolved over the few months that they had been there, but as a mild autumn began to give way to a sudden and brutally unkind winter, things had become increasingly difficult. He sat in the room, glancing forlornly at the empty fireplace and wishing that there were sufficient fuel stores to have even a small blaze to heat the room. He sighed loudly, uncharacteristically betraying his feelings, and tucked his chin deeper into the large uniform smock he still insisted on wearing, despite the multiple layers he wore underneath, including a thick, knitted jumper to insulate against the chill.

  People often spoke of the onset of winter being sudden, but this year had been the worst in his memory and the cold was worse than the many skiing excursions his family had taken him on as a child. Pipes froze solid overnight, cracking the old brass open like a hatching egg and sparking terror as people ran around the large house looking for anyone with plumbing experience. By the time such a man had been located and roused from his bed the flooding had caused extensive damage to the old carpets and the floorboards beneath. The floor below cascaded water through the cracked plaster ceiling to elicit shrieks of fear and discomfort from those suffering from the unnatural indoor rain, and what came after was worse still.

  Because of the pandemonium and ensuing need for lights to be switched on during darkness, an operational cardinal sin, the house attracted unwelcome attention from the outside which raged on throughout the freezing night and into the morning. That single, costly night had taken a significant toll on their lives in the form of half of their remaining ammunition being expended and claiming the lives of three defenders. They still hadn’t recovered from those losses, and morale at the house had plummeted into a deep depression.

  Thinking again of the long and confusing engagement, Palmer tried to find the positives as well as ruthlessly assessing their defensive performance and plans. The wide ditch they had dug surrounding the vulnerable approaches to the house had undoubtedly saved them from being overrun, as had the bitterly cold weather which the area was unused to experiencing. They had found that from autumn the number of Screechers wandering around had reduced exponentially, and those who did wander up to their defensive lines in ones and twos were sluggish and rotting far worse than they had seen them deteriorate through summer.

  On that night, when fate conspired with bad luck to deal them a cruel blow, they came in waves until entire sections of the ditches filled with bodies and allowed the shambling attackers to step over the writhing, struggling bodies to walk almost unimpeded towards the warm flesh of the men and women under Palmer’s charge. Palmer was an officer of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, an officer trained at Sandhurst, which in his opinion, provided the finest officer training in the world, as was demonstrated by the multi-national attendees eager to take back the ways of the British Army to their native lands. But he was still unaccustomed to leading their rag-tag band in defensive infantry tactics without resupply or additional support. It felt unorthodox and more than a little desperate at times. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, the bonds of discipline and service were beginning to unravel everywhere he looked. Uniform wore out and was replaced by civilian clothing, and the cold weather diluted that compliance further still as the men wore whatever they could find to stop them from freezing, just as he did, but at least he still tried to maintain some semblance of protocol.

  A knock at the door snapped him out of his miserable reverie, and he drew in a breath to announce that the person should enter, but he swallowed the word as the door opened a fraction of a second later; as though the knock was simply a warning instead of a request for permission. He relaxed when he saw who it was, leaning back and crossing his arms for warmth to tuck his cold hands under his armpits.

  “Julian, how are you?” Lieutenant Lloyd asked.

  “I’m well, thank you, Chris,” Palmer answered with a genuine smile. He liked the Royal Marine officer, seeing in the slightly younger man a leader who was respected by his men, and capable.

  Perhaps ‘capable’ is grossly inadequate, he had thought to himself when assessing the man, as he is personally responsible for bringing the vast majority of our fighting strength out of the fiery hell that was the Island.

  And he was. It was his quick thinking and decisive action which had seen a ragged infantry formation, like a rally-square, which had crab-walked its awkward way up almost a mile of steep hill, fighting every step of the way and rescuing as many people as possible before forming a defence atop the hill. They had defended that landing site, suffering the agonising wait between the relay flights of the helicopter which had rescued them from the furnace.

  Most of them, anyway.

  “Going over the company books?” the junior officer asked blandly to open the conversation.

  “Sadly yes,” Palmer replied, “and they do not make for an enjoyable read, I’m afraid.”

  “Food?”

  “Always food,” Palmer replied tiredly. He glanced at the crystal decanter, automatically feeling the urge to pour both of them a brandy as they discussed business, in spite of the time of day, but the vessel had long since run dry and as nobody had left the house in the weeks since the last attack, any hope of a fresh supply was woefully deluded.

  “But also fuel; for the house and the vehicles. And we have burned through too much ammunition to make viable many more defensive actions of the nature we have already endured,” he added in his naturally verbose manner, meaning simply that they were running out of bullets faster than they could afford to. His mind wandered to the strange trend he had witnessed emerging among both soldiers and civilians carrying crude melee weapons with them. Most soldiers relied on the bayonets affixed to the ends of their personal weapons, even if the destructive projectiles were in short supply, but many had also begun sporting folding shovels, hammers and small axes which stayed with them at all times.

  “I think we need to discuss reconnaissance with the Major,” he told the royal marine.

  Lloyd nodded sagely as he sat, mulling over his friend’s words. The roles and hierarchy of their group had merged and evolved too since their flight and devastating losses after the Island had become overrun and cut off, and as Palmer had been volunteered as the de-facto leader of the group, Lloyd had assumed a sub-command of the defences. Be they marine or trooper or civilian, everyone assigned to defend their home had fallen under the command of the Lieutenant without question or protest, bar one man. Palmer’s younger brother, Oliver, who still insisted on using the double-barrelled version of their family name as though status and breeding meant a damn thing when abandoned and facing starvation, had been assigned to Lloyd as his second in command.

  The junior Lieutenant was universally scorned and disliked by the men after his behaviour had once more grown sullen and smacked of assumed privilege. His older brother had hoped that to assign him to that task would make him more accessible to the men, and would allow them to see him working hard, but he too often heard that he was delegating his duties in favour of spending time rubbing shoulders with the half-insensible Colonel who provided little to no practical assistance in their plight. Palmer had managed to steal the senior officer’s two privates away from the man to bolster the defenders’ numbers, but Second Lieutenant Palmer’s repeated absences from duty were both embarrassing and inconsequential.

  “The Major will be pleased,” Lloyd opined, “I think he and his boys are suffering from a little cabin fever.”

  The Major in question, Clive Downes, while clearly a more experienced and senior officer, had declined the gracious offer to lead their group, claiming that it wasn’t his area of business. Palmer, as much as he hated the responsibility on a daily basis, had to agree. Having a four-man Special Air Service patrol at his disposal was something of a luxury when it came to stepping outside the relative safety of their draughty home. On every occasion they had planned to raid an area for supplies, he had first allow
ed the special forces soldiers to go in quietly and return to provide an in-depth intelligence report on enemy activity and the requirements of any ensuing mission. This template had worked flawlessly until the weather had turned, but the voluntary grounding of their helicopter in order to preserve the fuel and mechanical integrity of the aircraft had greatly limited their abilities. Now, he felt, necessity would force them to brave the treacherous weather in order to survive.

  “I’ll speak to him,” Palmer said, “because I doubt we have more than two or three weeks’ worth of food remaining, even on reduced rationing.”

  That seemed to end their conversation on that matter as neither wanted to face the realities of their dire situation. That situation extended solely to food, luckily, as they still had running water for reasons unknown to them. They had power still, but they knew the cause for this was as a direct result of a mission carried out by the Major and his team back when there was still hope of containing the nationwide outbreak, and they were inserted by helicopter to a nuclear power plant where the dial was effectively cranked back down to the lowest setting. The engineers had assured them that the plant would run for many more years like that, as it only needed the constant maintenance to run at optimal levels. Given that the demand for electricity was only a fraction of what it had been before, they hadn’t experienced any loss of power. The power alone didn’t help that they were all freezing slowly to death, however.

  Very uncommonly for the area, their luck ran out when they dived headlong into the worst winter any of them could recall. The marines grumbled that they preferred their arctic warfare training in the Norwegian winter to the conditions they were facing now, because at least there they were prepared and equipped appropriately. His own men had even taken to wearing their NBC, or nuclear/biological/chemical, protection suits over their clothing in an effort to block out the worst of the cold.

  Lloyd put a stop to the grumbling of his marines before it gathered momentum by assembling his men and telling them all to reach down with their right hands to check that they still had balls, which silenced any further complaints.

  The worst affected areas of the vast house, which was heated by log and coal fires and the precious heating oil which fired the huge Aga in the old part of the kitchen, had been granted the use of the gas-bottle powered heaters, but as they were now a finite resource and the high ceilings made most of the heat they provided a waste, they were used sparingly. Palmer had a huge list of priorities to attend to, and heating was among those at the top of the list. He wanted a wholesale coal dealer emptied, almost salivating at the thought of sitting beside a roaring fire and being warm for the first time in weeks, but he knew that warmth would be pointless without food.

  No, he told himself as he and Lloyd lapsed into a brooding silence, we need food and we need it now.

  Chapter 2

  They had every intention of resting for only a day or two after finding the safety of the abandoned village, following their fluke survival of a brutal helicopter crash, but as always, best laid plans often fell away at the first hurdle.

  Finding the house had been total happenstance and discovering that there were two young children living there was utterly miraculous to them all. The resilience and bravery of the young boy, Peter, had emerged slowly as he relaxed more around them to speak about his experiences.

  The young girl, Amber, still hadn’t spoken a word to any of the adults, although she occasionally whispered into Peter’s ear. She did show signs of warming up to one of them, however, and the way she stared at their Norwegian parachute commando bordered on the obsessive at times.

  Johnson, in a rare moment of giving in to the urge to smoke, took the packet scavenged from one of the village houses and a lighter to the back garden, and leaned back to perch on the low stone wall of the raised patio. As he lit the cigarette and inhaled, the sound of the sliding doors opening and closing made him turn awkwardly to crane his neck around the bulk of his right shoulder to see who it was. Surprised to see that it was Peter, he nodded to the boy who zipped up his oversized coat all the way to his cheeks in response to the chill in the air, to rest on the frosty stone near to the man three times his size. The two sat in comfortable silence for a time, both staring out over the low ground which fell away from the rear of their modest castle at the thin wisps of mist hanging near to the frozen dew on the grass.

  “She likes Astrid, doesn’t she?” Johnson asked the boy, meaning to discern the reasons behind the little girl’s stares at the blonde haired commando. Peter sighed and dropped his head.

  “Her mum had hair like she does,” he answered simply. Johnson said nothing for a while, going back over the facts he had in his head about their story.

  “What happened to her mother?” he asked gently, “You said you found her.”

  “I did,” Peter said sadly, before pausing and explaining, “I was hiding in a house and heard people. In a car. They broke into another house and dragged her away, then they broke into the house I was hiding in, but they didn’t find me. When they left I went to look, and I found Amber.”

  Johnson drew in a breath, fighting down the savage words that had loaded themselves on the tip of his tongue ready to fire. He swallowed them down and thought before responding.

  “You’re a very brave young man, Peter,” he said carefully, forcing the anger out of his voice in case the boy misunderstood and thought it was directed at him. He knew why men would drag away a woman, but he doubted that Peter would or even that he should understand that yet. “I wish I had a few dozen as brave as you in my squadron.” Instantly he regretted his words, as only one of the men who had served under him had shown anything but the utmost effort and bravery. Those men were gone now, scattered and dead to a man possibly, but he had to hope that they had stayed together and stayed alive.

  “I had to kill one of the monsters, though,” he went on as though Johnson hadn’t spoken. “The front door was broken and it just… walked in. Probably following the noise,” he added, with a sensibility and maturity beyond his small frame and short years.

  Johnson had no words this time, so he lowered his head and smoked thoughtfully. His natural manner left him lost when dealing with children; as though he didn’t know how to be around them after a lifetime of being ordered and giving orders among other rough men. Instead he chose to change the subject.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  “Don’t sleep much anymore,” Peer said wistfully, his words again making him sound decades older than he was, as though the experience of the last few months had aged him beyond repair and had ended his childhood years before it should have faded into adulthood.

  “Want to do the morning checks with me?” asked the Squadron Sergeant Major without a squadron or any men to command, taking a final drag and grinding out the cigarette into the frozen ground. In response, Peter stood and nodded.

  Johnson put on a woolly hat and picked up his tools, taking one of the suppressed submachine guns from where the weapons rested against the wall in the lounge. Peter took his own weapon from that rack too, having taken to placing it there to mimic the adults he idolised but didn’t know how to engage with comfortably. He always carried the small spike, like a crude and homemade ice pick, and he slipped the sawn-off shotgun into his small backpack as he hefted the pitchfork and looked up to Johnson, nodding to signify that he was ready to go.

  Johnson checked that his gun was loaded, which he knew it always would be, and slung it behind him to pick up what had become his primary weapon in the form of a small sledgehammer. Most men would tire even carrying such a tool, let alone have the strength to swing it more than a few times to crush the skulls of former human beings, but Johnson managed it.

  They hadn’t been forced to do much in the way of fighting since they had arrived there, especially seeing as Peter had dispatched a tenth of the undead still trapped inside the small village before their appearance, but when the injuries to Kimberley and the irascible Sergean
t Hampton had taken longer than expected to heal and allow them mobility, they had decided to stay where they were until their entire contingent was fully fit. Johnson had told them about the plan to form up at the base and search for another permanent site after that, but their early foray to that base had been met with depressing evidence of carnage and destruction. Of the three sites suggested for the squadron to reform, Johnson could not recall any of the locations, so had spent days on end compiling a list of potential sites to be checked for their companions, if any yet survived. Shortly after they had found the village, a helicopter had been heard, but when they went outside into the secluded back garden to check, the aircraft had disappeared and had not been seen since. In case it came back over, Johnson had found a large tub of white gloss paint and used a broom to push the sticky white fluid around on the empty patch of road by the house. He painted four simple characters, not writing ‘help’, but instead leaving his individual calling card in his radio callsign. If whatever was flying around was military, which it almost certainly had to be, then seeing the legend of F33A emblazoned on the road below, Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha, would grab their attention instantly.

  Before they knew it, however, and far sooner than they had expected, the temperatures had dropped and the first snow fell to entomb them for over a week and obscure their aerial message. After that, the priority to move and take their uncertain chances on the road fell into second place behind surviving the winter.