“No,” came the growled response from the driving seat, “definitely not a mate, and whatever that little prick is up to, you can guarantee it’s not good.”
~
“Whoever it was,” Michaels said in a voice that was clearly pissed off, but tinged with a kind of wary respect for the mysterious person he had tried to kill, “they’ve done a decent job here.” He turned to address the nervous gaggle of followers who darted their eyes everywhere as though they expected some undead abomination to emerge from a side street at any moment. “Come on in,” he called to them, seeing the collective flinch at his raised voice, “grab everything and load it up.”
He wandered outside, seeing the flow of his small crowd of followers part around him like water repelled by compressed air, and Nevin followed as his self-appointed right hand.
“Your old lot?” he asked his newest recruit and fellow deserter.
“Could be,” Nevin said, “but I doubt it. If it was them I’d expect more. They’d have a lot of the troopers on it, not to mention the bloody bootnecks and the Sass blokes.”
“Hmm,” Michaels growled ambiguously, not making it clear whether he understood Nevin’s points or whether he was just concerned at having elite soldiers knocking about near his patch.
“I reckon they lost nearly half of the fighting men when I got away,” Nevin opined, “and they weren’t supposed to be heading this way, but further inland towards the north west.”
“Hmm,” Michaels growled again, more thoughtfully this time as he turned away and scanned the ground for something he didn’t seem to feel like sharing just yet. He walked slowly, his head sweeping back and forth as he crossed the road, with the smallest of glances to either side which, as unlikely as traffic was, still demonstrated how ingrained some behaviours were in most humans. Nevin followed at a wary, respectable distance until he saw the man stop and stoop to the pavement. Nevin followed, leaning over the crouching man to see the trampled remains of a children’s treat in his hand. The colourful foil wrapper had merged into the soft chocolate interior and all of that moulded to form a crust over the plastic capsule inside as it set harder in the chill temperatures.
Wordlessly, Michaels stood and dropped the detritus as though dismissing the clue as irrelevant.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said as he turned and strode back to the gun store, “Half the people left won’t survive this winter anyway.”
He chivvied their efforts, doubling them almost by his presence alone as the unspoken fear of his displeasure radiated outwards. They made no effort to sort or select anything, merely took the entire contents that weren’t nailed down too securely, before loading it all into a van to be sorted when safely back on their hilltop. He led the way personally into the large freezer store, gun up and eyes narrowed, dispatching two of the things which were mostly dormant in a darkened rear stock room, before pulling shut the open door leading to the loading bay, and ordering everything to be taken. The restaurant part of his new home, taken by the threat of force alone against the unprepared and unsuspecting occupants, had a large walk-in freezer which could cope with most of what they took. When the vans were full, he ordered the place locked up again for a return trip when their supplies ran low. He knew that there would be fresh supplies coming each month from the survivors he intimidated, but relying on other people wasn’t something that the former sergeant did any more.
Chapter 7
“Chop, chop,” Nevin crowed petulantly at the human chain of ‘volunteers’ who had been ordered out into the cold to unload and sort the scavenged food on their return. He, like Michaels, believed in a hierarchy which dictated that the fighting men such as himself did not need to undertake the lowly tasks of cooking and washing clothes, as the ungrateful people under their protection should earn their keep. He stopped at a girl, thirteen or fourteen years old maybe, and grabbed her slender wrist after she had struggled to pass on an armful of frozen potatoes. His grip was too strong for her to pull away, so she froze still, her body weight leaning away from him in protest as she was powerless to resist any other way.
“What have you done here?” he asked, looking at the bright red skin denoting the fresh scars on her wrists, “Tried the coward’s way out, did we?”
The girl summoned all of her strength to pull her arm away as her eyes flashed with bright, wet hatred and embarrassment. Nevin saw her doing this, and just as she set her stance to wrench her hand free, he let go of her, laughing as she fell heavily onto her backside to writhe in pain at the impact of her unsuspecting arse-cheeks hitting cold concrete. She stared back at him with undisguised hatred, her breath coming rapidly and raggedly through her nose as her mouth was set into a tight grimace to keep the tears of anger at bay. She found her feet as a kindly woman stepped directly in front of her.
“Go and help Ellie stack the freezer,” she said, before adding a whisper of “now.”
The girl went, without a backwards glance at the woman who had diverted her rage, or at the bastard who had invoked it.
The woman, Pauline, the original occupant of the historical site which had been preserved only through investment to turn it into a hotel and restaurant, went back to her task without saying anything to him, even though she desperately wanted to let her thoughts spew out in a torrent of indignant rage. She had taken the girl under her wing, much as she had with the older woman she had sent her to help after the bastards had dragged her away from her daughter to leave the little girl to a gruesome fate. That young woman, Ellie, had been deposited with Pauline, and she had looked after her as well as she could, even though the loss of her daughter left a gaping, ragged hole in her heart, which wasn’t soothed at all by the tears she shed every night as she lay in bed thinking about what had happened to her.
Eventually the exhaustion of the thoughts combined with her tortured insomnia to render her into a state of unconsciousness more than sleep, and each morning she woke, having had a few precious moments more rest and she became able to function a little more every day.
She had resigned herself to her brutal and tragic loss now, seeking a reason to go on living after the certain knowledge of losing her baby girl had finally sunk in, and just when she was considering walking off the cliff, one of the raiding parties, as she thought of them, returned with fresh recruits to their community.
~
When Jessica had first been dragged away in the ambulance from her unhappy home life, she had fought hard against her lawful abductors. She tried to refuse the tablets they gave her, saying that she felt fine and didn’t want to have anything to help her relax. The two nurses in white uniforms had held her down then, forcing open her mouth with something like a wooden spoon, and dropped two blue pills into her mouth. They tasted bitter, and she fought hard to spit them out, but her mouth was held closed, until her body betrayed her and the natural swallowing reflex happened. The two still held her down as the ambulance leaned away from the bends in the road, for what seemed like mile after mile, until her arms and legs lost the power to push against them. It felt as if her whole body was numb, inside a bubble where the sounds and sensations of the outside world were muted and slowed somehow. She tried to speak, to curse them and demand to be let go, so that she could walk back and protect her little brother from the hell he had been left in. She couldn’t speak. It was as if her lower jaw had been paralysed, and she was just drooling past her numb tongue when she tried.
Hours went by in that state when, unknown to her, it had been far less. The slowed passage of time in her drug-induced condition messed with her perception, giving her a sense of days passing with each minute. She was wheeled out of the ambulance after it stopped, reversing to bump the rear wheels against an unseen kerb. Somehow she knew this; could picture it as though experiencing the end of the journey from an outside perspective. She fell further into that thought, allowing her mind to distance itself from her body as the wheels of the metal trolley she was strapped to clattered and bounced down the ramp and int
o the cooler dark interior through double doors. Strip lights flashed above her intermittently as she was transported deeper inside the white-walled interior, until she was left alone on the trolley directly under one of the lights, and she could hear voices that sounded muffled coming from a nearby room. One light, the one on the right to her perspective, flickered almost imperceptibly as though it kept phasing in and out so fast that nobody could see it. She could. She could see it clearly and even began to be able to predict when it would happen at irregular intervals. It blinked out for a long second, flickering back to life and radiating its yellowy glow outwards before anyone but her noticed. She began to think it was talking to her; like it was trying to communicate in some way to only her, as if they were both prisoners in this place, and neither could speak freely for fear of the nurses overhearing them and foiling any plans they might make together.
I know, she told it in her mind, we need to get out of here.
She had been moved, had her clothes taken off her, and her wounded wrists dressed again with fresh bandages. She’d felt a sensation in those cuts when they were roughly wiped clean, and her brain told her that it registered that sensation as a stinging feeling, but somehow the connections to the part of her brain that felt pain were severed or blocked.
She had been dressed in a simple gown which was left open at the back when she was transferred onto a bed in a plain room, where every fixture was immovable and built into the walls. Eventually she managed to sit up, still feeling as though she was inside that same bubble, but as if the walls were growing thinner, allowing more of the terrible outside world to penetrate and send her confusing messages. Her mouth was dry, a sudden return of a normal feeling to her, and as though the room knew what she needed, her eyes found a plastic jug half-filled with water and a paper cup beside it. She poured herself some, getting nearly half of what she spilled over the lip of the jug into the cup, and drained it.
It seemed to her if the water wasn’t water at all, even though it tasted just like water, but was instead some elixir which woke her up and returned her full array of senses to her. With that return, after her fourth cup was raised to her mouth by her shaking hands, her memory returned with all of the rage and hate and terror that she had missed out on when she had been in the bubble. She stopped drinking, turned her head slowly towards the thick off-white interior of the door without a handle, and threw the plastic jug at it with a high-pitched scream of rage.
The jug clattered off the door to clatter noisily on the floor in three bounces before it came to a spinning stop. As that sound disappeared, it was replaced by another, building in volume as it became multiple pairs of shoes moving with ominous purpose towards her door.
The shutter snapped open, revealing a pair of eyes on the other side of the thick Perspex viewing port, then it snapped closed again. She heard a chuckle from the corridor, followed by the sound of the shoes squeaking away in diminishing volume, until she was left alone with only the sound of her breath coming fast.
She ran at the door, bouncing off it as she screamed in rage and frustration, tears streaming down her face from the anger she was feeling, more than from any shred of weakness. The sounds of shoes returned with more purpose, menacingly stamping and squeaking along the corridor until the view port again revealed eyes, only this time narrowed in anger instead of wide with amusement. The shutter snapped across again, and a heavy clunk of a disengaging door lock echoed dully inside her empty cell.
The door spilled inwards, three grown men filling the gap in an instant as she was snatched up and off her feet to be piled back down onto the bed. She fought and screamed as they forced her wrists and ankles into the leather restraints, arching her back as she tried to bite them and use the only weapon available to her that they hadn’t taken away.
They stepped back, out of breath and chuckling at the defenceless girl who was half the size of any one of them, so no match at all for all three. They left her alone, now unable even to reach her face to remove the sweat-sticky strands of hair out of her eyes. She stuck out her lower jaw and blew upwards, attempting to dislodge the annoyance that way, but gave up after a handful of attempts and lay back in angry exhaustion.
She had no idea how long she had been there, but the light from the single, high window grew dull. After her breathing had returned to normal, she felt cold, shivering as the cool air dried the sweat from her body and seemed to leave her permanently deprived of the body heat she had lost.
She lay there into the night, her cell lit only by the wan shaft of dull yellow from an external light outside the window, and she must have drifted in and out of consciousness because she had wet herself at some point. She’d heard footsteps a few times. Had heard the shutter squeak quietly open, as though whoever was peering in wanted to keep the animal in the cage undisturbed as much as possible, and in the depths of the night she heard another sound from the corridor which chilled her more than the low temperature could ever have done.
~
The outbreak had spread quickly from the separate section of the hospital, as the main building had been one of the epicentres of the local infection. Being a rural area, naturally the distance between hospitals capable of providing trauma care was often vast. Those attacked and bitten ahead of the main waves of dead flowing outwards from London were rushed to hospital, and in such confined areas where the sick and injured languished in beds, it made the rapid spread a forgone conclusion as the first of many critically ill patients died and then rose in a new form, in which their milky blind eyes zeroed in on the nearest victims.
One of the nurses from the Accident and Emergency department had been smoking outside a fire escape door when the screams and shouts of alarm first came from inside. She dropped her cigarette, grinding it out with her shoe by automatic reflex, looked inside and saw the man who had been brought in with the animal bite to his arm stomping almost drunkenly across the corridor with both arms raised towards an unseen target.
That makes sense, she thought, drunk most probably. The bloke’s burning a fever and blathering on about it being a man who’s bitten him, when there’s no way that’s been caused by a person.
Then the blood fountained past her view, making her hesitate and take an automatic step backwards away from the inexplicable horror she could see inside. The blood was followed by the drunken man on his hands and knees, snuffling at the hot, sticky liquid on the shiny floor. He froze, his head snapping up to lock his gaze directly onto her face as he sniffed the air with exaggerated animal-like movements.
She saw the eyes; milky and clouded as though he had been blinded by cataracts. The head tilted slowly to one side as the muscles of his body tensed before he flew at her.
He’s not drunk, she decided, that’s not natural. Nobody should move like that.
She stood transfixed by his approach as he slipped and slid on the spilled blood, until her senses regained control of her terrified body and she reached out to slam the heavy door hard into his face. The door bounced back, revealing a writhing body crumpled in the doorway where the thick wood had impacted and rearranged his facial features hideously. He climbed back to his feet as she stood dumbstruck at what she was seeing and hearing from inside, and then she ran.
She ran faster than she had ever run before and wouldn’t have thought herself capable of such a feat. She was not a small woman, nor would she ever class herself as athletic by any stretch of the imagination, but she propelled herself with an inhuman speed blindly across the road towards the nearest building set on higher ground.
Snuffling and grunting came from behind her until a hideous, terrifying noise ripped the air as though a set of bagpipes was being tortured on an inward breath. The guttural, primal scream the man emitted spurred her faster until she dared risk a glance behind her to see the man stumbling stiff-limbed closer to her.
The ambulance came from nowhere. Later she realised that her terror and focus had been so consumed by her attacker, by the predator hunting her down,
that her brain must have filtered out the sound of the approaching engine and the screech of locked tyres and the sirens. It hit the man square, thumping him bodily through the air with a vile crunch of metal and bone to send him twenty paces down the road away from her. She froze again, unaware of how much her chest was heaving with the rapid breathing, and her instincts took over to send her two steps towards the sight of the injured man, despite the unnaturally violent behaviour he had exhibited. When she saw his broken and shattered limbs begin to move, saw him start to right himself with his ruined body and swivel his crooked neck back around to face her, all sense of helping the man vanished as quickly as it had first appeared, all duty of care evaporated in a heartbeat, and she turned and ran again as other afflicted men and women spilled from the main building.
Going via the rear entrance to the other building, if only to seek sanctuary inside away from the monsters she feared were chasing her, she ran inside and turned to bolt the doors behind her. She ran through the corridors, finding some doors locked and others open to her.
Too late, she found the suddenly familiar sounds of screams and screeches from ahead, and faltered, turning back to bump chest first into a white-uniformed orderly running towards the sounds.
“No,” she pleaded, “don’t go that way.”
“I’ve got to…” he started to say before she slapped him to focus his attention.
“No! You’ve got to get us out of here. Right now. People have gone mad,” she told him, “they’re… killing each other.”
He hesitated for a second, seeing nothing but the maniacally desperate look in her eyes, then led her away from the terrible sounds. He hesitated again, his hands fluttering at the keys clipped on his waist as he slowed, and turned to her.
“I’ve got to help them,” he said as he thrust the keys at her, “get as many people out as you can, just don’t open any of the doors with a red card by them.”
Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity Page 6