She swallowed, nodded, and watched the man jog away as his shoes squeaked on the floor. Left in silence, she turned and walked to the nearest door to peer through the thick glass of the observation window. She glanced away, checking the details of the name and the colour-coded card beside the door. She saw that it bore a piece of red card underneath the legend of a name, surname first, and she looked back inside just as something hit the glass with a wet thud.
She reoiled, stepping back as the fresh shit smeared slowly down with gravity and the cackling laugh bounced around the concrete walls within.
That one can stay there, she told herself, moving down the corridor until she found a door without a coloured card. She looked through, her breath catching as she saw a young girl strapped to the bed looking small and helpless in the leather restraints. She paused, glancing hesitantly at the lack of colour-coordinated risk assessment, and she made a judgement call in the desperate hope that she was right. Fumbling with the keys, she unlocked the door.
~
Jessica thought back to that day often. Now, as she hauled frozen bags of potatoes and vegetables onto shelves in the huge freezer, she wondered where her younger brother was, and if he had survived too.
Chapter 8
ECHO-ONE-ONE, CHARLIE-ONE-ONE. SITREP: NO LOSSES TO C-1-1. CONSOLIDATED POSITION AT 50.8734N, 2.8915W WITH MIXED CIVILIAN AND OTHER ARMS PERSONNEL. SUPPLIES LOW BUT SUSTAINABLE AT PRESENT. SURVIVORS IN EXCESS OF 100 REQUIRE EXTRACTION. CONFIRM VIABILITY OF SECURE LOCATION.
The message on the small screen was short and to the point, and it also had to be sent when the four-man SAS team were safely away from prying eyes at the big house. Privacy was not something many people could enjoy on any military base, and Major Downes had yet to bring Captain Palmer up to speed on the other deployments of special forces troops. That would have been so far beyond his original paygrade that his need to know had gone from night to day.
“Keep it on, Smiffy,” he said, meaning for his trooper to preserve the integrity of the complex snaking antenna cables used to send the burst data transmission on one of the set frequencies programmed into their man-portable radio, “we’ll give them an hour and pack it up.”
“No need, Boss,” Smiffy said, “getting one back now.”
Downes damn near bowled the man out of the way as he pushed his face up to the small readout to take in the answering message.
CHARLIE-ONE-ONE, ECHO-ONE-ONE. NO LOSSES TO ECHO TEAMS. OUR LOCATION IS VIABLE AND DEFENDED. SUPPLIES ADEQUATE. UNABLE TO SEND EVAC BY AIR. RECOMMEND JOURNEY BY VEHICLE OR BOAT VIA SHALLOW COASTAL WATERS ONLY. REPEAT, VEHICLE OR SHALLOW COASTAL WATERS ONLY.
“Well, bugger me…” Downes said to himself.
“Rather not, Boss,” Mac intoned from behind him, “I’m more of the blonde hair, big boobs and daddy issues type.” Downes ignored the levity and explained.
“Major Kelly has four bricks under his command,” he said, using the slang term for the four-man teams they usually operated in at the coalface level, “and they were in London as soon as that lab went dark. They were sent for a selection of VIPs and evac’ed by helicopter to a place designated ‘Echo’.”
The three other men of his tightly-bound team exchanged looks. Only Mac’s face remained impassive, as the other two were learning about this for the first time.
“We’ve still got a government?” Dez asked.
“Of a sort,” Downes answered, “but I rather suspect they’re being kept safe for whatever comes after. They are set up for this, the quarantine I mean, and something tells me they aren’t scratching around for flour and yeast like we are.”
Smiffy read over the response again, asking why the need to emphasise the shallow water approach.
“Because whatever is left of NATO’s naval forces will probably sink anything seen leaving the British or Irish mainland, I imagine,” Downes answered. “Send an acknowledgement,” he instructed his trooper.
Smiffy pressed the buttons on the backpack-sized device attached to the lengths of wires, then began collapsing the equipment and packing it back down to be stowed in the rear of their Land Cruiser taken for the reconnaissance mission at the request of Palmer.
“You wait,” Smiffy said as he hauled the ungainly radio up and into the tailgate, “one day we’ll be able to do this from our personal mobile telephones.”
“Dream on, laddy,” Mac drawled, “you just focus on the job we’re doing before you get all that Star Trek nonsense in your head. What are you after? A phone call from your watch?”
Smiffy shrugged. His job was to get the job done, whatever it might be. Unlike the rest of the army where a man or woman would have one main job and maybe learn how to undertake the roles of the others around them until their experience grew sufficiently so that they understood the bigger picture, he had lots of jobs. He was a sniper and a signalman, being well-versed in long-range communications as well as long-range killing. He was part engineer, part infantryman, part paratrooper, as well as being a half-decent medic, as they all were. That was what marked them out as different; not their size or natural ability, but their attitude and their resource for learning.
“So, what’s the deal with this secure site, Boss?” Dezzy asked gently, not wanting to get shut down for raising the subject. Downes stopped folding the map he had been looking at back to its original dimensions, pausing as though he was giving serious thought as to whether he should share the information in full. He resumed his folding with a sharp intake of breath, as though the moment of introspection had robbed him of the ability to inhale, and he stuffed the map into his bag.
“Scotland. Inner Hebrides to be more exact,” he explained, “isolated and well stocked, and hopefully they should be able to see out the infection or whatever it is, and return to re-establish order. I thought it was a badly kept secret, but obviously not. They’ve been planning this as a fall-back space for years in case of bio or nuclear attack; they’ve built bunkers and stockpiled God knows what. There can’t be too many of us left, probably even fewer after this bloody winter ends, and there will be a lot of rebuilding to do.”
“How does that affect us?” Smiffy asked as he leaned on the side of the truck.
“How do you think?” Mac butted in and answered for the Major, “Every house, every shop, every factory and every farm in the whole bloody UK needs clearing.” His words left them all quiet as the prospect of surviving brought with it even more challenges.
“I mean, come on,” Mac went on, “we’ve seen how they freeze up in this weather, and my guess is that they’ll degrade somehow when the weather warms again, but that doesn’t stop the faster ones much now, does it?”
Nobody answered his rhetorical question.
“Mac’s right,” Downes said, “we know they go into a kind of hibernation, and any that have followed any Limas inside buildings and gone into winter mode will still be dangerous when they,” he waved his hand vaguely to try and demonstrate the word he was looking for in vain, “when they… snap out of it or whatever. Fuck me, lads, even one of them left could end the world all over again. That’s how it started this time.”
Dezzy looked at him, taking in his words and not wanting to lose any more time, or focus on the future of what ifs. He glanced at Smiffy, the two men feeling ever responsible for one another, and both shot the other a look that said it didn’t matter much to them anyway. They’d just do their jobs.
~
An hour passed, which had been spent in near silence as they systematically cleared a small village door-to-door, just as they had discussed doing all over their afflicted country in order to get life back to normal. Towards the end of the main road which passed as the High Street, their tactics evolved, as there could be only a few enemy remaining in the village, even if they were alerted to their presence, and the team began to make more noise.
The far end of that stretch, nothing more than a reduced speed limit on a section of winding road, held a huddle of houses set back on one side before t
he road opened up into countryside views again.
“Smiffy,” Downes said in a low voice, “push up to the GLF and hold. Dezzy, on me, ready for the door. Mac, take tail.”
None of them answered, but all dropped into their allocated positions. Dez would open the door, one way or another, and Downes would enter with Mac behind him, while Smiffy kept an eye on the road in both directions from the iconic road sign which had put a smile on the face of any person who had undertaken a fast driving course. The white circle with a diagonal black flash, denoting a derestricted speed limit or, as they liked to call it, Go Like Fuck.
Dez put a hand on the doorknob, pausing to glance at the other two men and receiving a nod to continue, and then he turned the handle to find it locked. That in itself was rare in those parts, but you’d never expend the energy of kicking down a door unless you had to. The air of tension ebbed away noticeably as the three men knew they had a longer respite before action was required, and Mac moved to press his face to a downstairs window and check for movement.
Dezzy lowered his weapon on its sling, placing both gloved hands on the cold wood of the door and pressing to see where it flexed and where it was solidly secured. It bent inwards at the bottom on the same side as the lock, but the topmost corner on that side was annoyingly rigid.
“Bolted,” Dez said softly. He didn’t need to explain that this meant it was locked securely from the inside. “Go around?”
“Takes us past the other houses we haven’t cleared,” Downes said, “We go in this way.”
Dez nodded, holding out a hand to gesture his Major back away from the door as he reached behind himself to free the automatic shotgun. He raised the gun to his shoulder, checked behind him to see that the others weren’t too near to him, turned his face away and fired.
Mac hadn’t seen any movement inside, because the window he had peered through looked straight in at a wall. Had they moved further around the outside of the house and explored further, then they would have found the family of five still securely locked inside their home. They might have been secure, but they certainly weren’t safe.
The mother, complete with apron sheeted in blood where she had chewed on the hands, faces and necks of her own children, turned and cocked her head quizzically at the small creaks coming from her front door. It bent inwards slightly, flexing in the bottom corner before her ears detected something that made no cognitive connection, but instead translated into a primal feeling that there was prey nearby.
She turned to face it fully, feet shuffling on the spot before her stiff and seized legs took tentative steps towards it. The door was beautifully crafted, carved from a single piece of oak many years before any of them had been born, and it had hardened with age to be like stone. She heard clicks, voices, and the shuffle of a boot on stone, but again none of these sounds connected to any memories or made any associations in her brain, despite which she was spurred onwards regardless. Behind her, disturbed by her movement and suddenly reanimated state, her children followed in reverse order of height with her eldest child looking over the heads of what had been his two younger sisters before their once-loving mother had changed them into what they now were.
Finally finding her voice, the mother contracted the muscles in her chest to draw in a breath and with it the start of the dry-throated, creaking, shrieking noise they’d made when they’d heard noises outside their home. Since then, since that giant herd of people like they were, had passed through to leave them behind in silence and solitude, they hadn’t been stimulated enough to make that noise. But now, as their once-mother reached out a bony and emaciated hand towards the front door, her mouth let it out to tear the stale air in their home.
With a shattering BOOM, the top quarter of the door disintegrated, letting in a rush of cold, fresh air, as if their house had been a sealed ship in the vacuum of space. The splinters of wood from the sudden opening fanned out, some striking the woman and embedding themselves into her skull and face, but one flew straight and true into her open mouth to puncture the soft wall at the back and drive the wicked spike of hard wood through the sinew and flesh. It punctured her spinal column high up, and cut off the unthinking synapses which powered her arms and legs, and made her slump into a heap, effectively blocking her children from reaching the front door before it burst the rest of the way open to silhouette a big man in the aperture.
As one, they all shrieked in attack.
~
Dezzy fired a single shot into the wood where he thought the troublesome bolt was, shattering the door and creating a noise, ruinous and huge in the silent confines of the small village. He followed it up with the ballistic application of boot sole to the door just beside the lock. Utterly satisfied with both the mechanical and personal destruction he had just wrought, he stood in the doorway to assess his work. And swore ever so briefly but loudly.
He didn’t think, not like the way that the Screechers didn’t think, but more of a naturally human instinctive reaction. He just raised the gun already in his hands and triggered off five shots into the horrifying abominations reaching for him. He stood frozen, looking over the barrel of the demonic close-quarters tool, disgusted and horrified at what he had just done, until he was shoved aside bodily to crunch into the splintered doorframe. Before Dezzy could right himself and bring his weapon back up to face the threat which had caused the man behind him to act, he heard a pair of muted cracks in rapid succession followed by the sound of a lifeless body slumping to the floor.
Downes hauled his demolition expert back up to his full height, releasing him before stepping into the room with his MP5 held in tight to his shoulder and swinging it left and right to cover the room. Mac bustled in beside him, mirroring his movements to provide maximum speed as they cleared the dank smelling interior of the house. Dez stayed where he was in the doorway, almost panting and unable to control his breathing as he stared down at the horror and gore he had created in a second of unexpected and brutal violence.
A hand clamped onto his shoulder, making him jump and turn on the attacker as he raised the butt of his shotgun, intending to connect it to the skull of whatever had crept up on him when he had dropped the ball of concentration. The blow was blocked, and his eyes met the icy-blue reflection of Smiffy’s.
“It’s me, Dez,” he told him, “it’s me.”
Dezzy slumped, a half gasp of a stifled sob escaping his mouth, which made his friend lean over his shoulder at the destruction inside. Smiffy’s eyes went dull, glazing over as he saw, assessed, understood, dealt with and moved on; all in an instant.
“You had no choice,” he said to his friend, lightly slapping his face to bring their eyes back together, “Hey? You hear me? You had no choice. It’s shit, but it’s done. Now get yourself together.”
He held him by the shoulders for a few seconds, letting Dez’ exaggerated breathing stabilise, and watching as the oxygen and good sense returned him to his former self. Dez stood tall, emotionally dusting himself off, and walked inside to step over the three headless bodies of the young children as they lay collapsed in a meat pile in between their twice-dead parents.
Chapter 9
“Major,” Lloyd greeted the leader of the SAS team as he slid out of the passenger side of the truck. Downes walked to the leader of the marines and shook his hand.
“Lloyd,” he answered, scanning his eyes over the twenty men and two big transport trucks arrayed behind him at the agreed meeting place.
“All quiet down there?” the younger man asked, indicating the village in the shallow ground ahead.
Downes hesitated, recalling the initial look on the face of his man, usually so stalwart, reliable and unflappable, when he had first cleared that last house below and ahead of them.
“It is now,” he answered enigmatically, “Want us to hang around?”
“Could you?”
Before answering, Downes looked first at his watch and then up at the sky, which was grey and held an air of veiled malevolence.
/>
“May as well,” he said, “we aren’t going to get another village cleared before sundown and this weather closing in.”
Lloyd had to agree, having had the luxury of time to make his own guesses about the newest weather front as they waited for their scouts to return.
“I’ll put two at each end of the village,” Downes said, “If you hear us shooting, then pack up and get ready to move.”
“Understood,” Lloyd answered, turning to his men and shouting for them to load up, and instructing them that her Majesty wasn’t paying them to stand around and look pretty.
“They ain’t paying us at all, Sir,” came a disembodied voice from somewhere near a tail ramp.
“Enough of your treasonous comments, Foster,” Lloyd snapped half in jest, recognising the voice instantly despite the speaker’s obvious attempts to hide his identity, “but well done on volunteering to be the first man in. Proud of you, lad.”
Milton, three years the Lieutenant’s senior, smiled in the back of one of the trucks. He had no qualms about being the first man in, especially seeing as the Hereford lot had just been through, which minimised his chances of getting eaten. He had made the joke in the clear knowledge that the officer would return fire with some admonishment and raise the morale of the boys in the process.
He had been offered promotion, told, even, that he would be wearing three chevrons on his sleeve, but he had been adamant that he didn’t want it. After being summoned by Lieutenant Lloyd to the office where Captain Palmer ran things, he had stood to attention and kept his eyes resolutely forward until told to stand easy.
“Relax, man,” Palmer had said smoothly. Lloyd explained to Foster why he wanted him to take the rank, detailing the primary reasons that he was liked and respected by the surviving marines.
Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity Page 7