Chapter 3
As soon as the single shot echoed between the low hills, and the radio sparked to life, Sergeant Strauss ordered his men to start their engines and proceed. After no more than two hundred metres, two shapes emerged from the foliage at the right side of the road and stood to become the Royal Marine sniper team who had been ahead, and they looked at the target to see if any of the troublesome fast ones were there. The convoy slowed, and the two men, covered in carefully placed grass and twigs to make their suits and helmets blend into whatever surrounds were there, climbed aboard the Bedford truck in the centre of their five-vehicle convoy.
’Limas’, they called the faster ones, using the phonetic L for Leaders.
Leaders and Screechers, Strauss thought, at least it’s simpler than Soviets and terrorists.
Like a lot of the men in the Yeomanry squadron, Harry Strauss had conducted two active tours in Northern Ireland; one as a trooper and one as a Corporal, and the daily fear of not knowing who your enemy was had left him with memories he didn’t particularly enjoy. As inhuman as it sounded, he like most of the men, would have preferred a real, traditional war against the armed forces of another country. He wanted to practise his craft without the political worries and fear of prosecution, not out of any bloodlust, but for a desire to prove himself capable in his chosen, if secondary, profession. Now, seeming to get his wish, the enemy was clearly defined. Dead people walking around trying to eat him and his men were quite obviously hostile, and seeing as not one of them had ever registered understanding of a verbal warning, they had free rein in rendering safe the Screechers as and when they had to.
The addition of the marine sniper and his spotter had been at the suggestion of their officer, who seemed almost desperate to get his boys in the war. The capability of that two-man team was an incredible tool, if a little overly precise, and the rendering safe at distance of one of the Leaders was welcomed.
Strauss drove in the lead wagon, his head sticking out of the commander’s hatch, but with orders for the driver and others to stay closed down under the safety of their hatches. The risk, he felt, was his to take. Besides, he was controlling a GMPG machine gun with a belt of two hundred rounds ready to let fly, so he felt fairly safe.
Arriving at the builders’ yard, he dismounted his and two other of the four-wheeled scout tanks, and they cleared the building as the last armoured scout car stayed closed down to offer the support of the big guns, should it be needed. The Bedford, with the two marines now stripped of the ungainly sniper suits, had also dismounted, and were scanning the area from their kneeling positions at the rear of the truck as they peered down the barrels of their black and green assault rifles and the glinting tips of the fixed bayonets.
“Building is empty,” Strauss announced as he returned to the fresh air and slung his sub-machine gun on his back, “let’s do this.” And with that, three civilians were herded off the back of the truck and everyone but the crew of the last car and the two marines shuffled in and out of the big building, carrying the wooden posts and rolls of heavy barbed wire that would fortify their island even more.
Strauss himself, enjoying the few benefits of rank, didn’t engage in the fetch and carry as he maintained overall control of the operation. His own men, the twelve crewmen of his four well-maintained Fox scout cars, all knew him well enough to know that he didn’t consider himself so precious as to think manual labour was beneath him, and all of them respected him.
With the exception of one man, but then again Sergeant Strauss believed that he had the measure of trooper Nevin, and knew him to respect nothing; least of all himself. The man’s sullen laziness and his characteristic lack of effort offended Strauss because he knew that most of it was an act. Nevin played the fool intentionally, claiming not to understand how things worked so that others would just give up trying to educate him and do it themselves. What annoyed his sergeant so much though, was that he knew the man to be capable. He was a decent driver, never needing to be taught anything twice when it came to something he liked doing, but when the time came to clean down their wagons and gear, or to conduct routine mechanical maintenance, he would find such childish excuses to avoid work that he was universally avoided by most of the men. Socially the story was different, as others liked to be around him when the drinks were flowing, because he was entertainment.
Twice before he had been put on charges for fighting when drunk, not counting the most recent incident that the SSM hadn’t fully dealt with yet, and on the last occasion he had been charged by the police for head-butting an off-duty policeman in town. In addition to the fearsome kicking he had received, he faced disciplinary proceedings from the army, pending the outcome of the case, which was likely to result in a fine and compensation.
The case never got heard, in fact it wasn’t due to be heard until the week after everything went to shit, Strauss remembered, so yet again trooper bloody Nevin had avoided the consequences of his stupidity. Just as another roll of heavy wire was hauled up and manhandled onto the bed of the truck, his voice cut the air.
“Sarge?” Nevin whined to him, prompting an eye-roll in no less than four of the soldiers, including Strauss.
“What is it, Nevin?” the sergeant answered with a warning tone in his voice.
“I need a shit, Sarge,” Nevin answered with a smirk, either ignoring or not recognising the warning. Strauss temporarily lowered his weapon along with his head, which sagged before he drew in a breath, and then he raised his head to fix the smiling man with a look of annoyance.
“Out the back,” he said in a voice full of exasperation, “Harris, go with him and make sure he doesn’t get lost, will you?”
Trooper Harris nodded, managing to keep the ‘why me’ from his face, then nodded to Nevin to follow him behind the building, as though he were the unruly child of the troop and it was his turn to reluctantly be in charge of him.
~
Sally Crawford had been a housewife, and she had lived a very happy and satisfied existence until three weeks ago. She had been living in her semi-detached home, her husband had done well for himself, which had allowed her to have her own car, and that was only a year old. Her husband had gone to work one morning, driving his large Volvo estate that she jokingly referred to as The Hearse, and she had waved him off from the deep bay window in their front room. Turing to her two children, a boy and a girl born only thirteen months apart, she hurried them along to make sure they got to school on time.
Driving her own car, a Ford Orion that she was very proud of, even if the difference between that and her previous Ford Escort was subtle to the point of invisible from some angles, she took them to school and thought nothing of the roads being almost abandoned. She arrived at the school to find the gates closed and a lone teacher outside with a clipboard, who informed her that, unfortunately, the local authority had asked for all schools to close.
She assured Mrs Crawford that nothing was wrong and that it would all blow over soon enough, of that she was sure.
Turning to her children in the back seat, she smiled broadly and told them that they had got an extra day off. She smiled at their excitement and shot the teacher a withering look as she drove away.
Waste of my time, she thought to herself, they could’ve at least telephoned me.
Brushing away the negativity, because that was just the kind of woman she was, Sally smiled and turned up the radio as a Madonna song had started playing that she knew Charlotte, her eldest, liked. She smiled as she drove, stealing glances in the rear-view mirror to see her daughter mouthing the words with intense seriousness as she framed her face with straight hands and struck different poses.
Still wearing the smile reserved for her beautiful children, she hurried them up the stairs to change into other clothes and then spent the rest of the morning making craft projects with them. When midday came, she made herself a modest sandwich and joined them on a rug she had laid out on the lounge carpet so that they could enjoy an indoor picnic
.
They went to their own room in the afternoon to play, and Sally turned on the television. Her face fell as the reports clogged up each channel, telling the horrific tale of the mysterious disease spreading across London and taking with it waves of violence and mayhem.
She shot up out of her chair, flew to the telephone and dialled the agonisingly slow telephone number for her husband’s office in the dock almost ten miles away.
It rang and rang, making her knit her brow and replace the handset. Dialling again, frustrated that there were two nines in the number, and listened to the chirping tone indicating that the phone was ringing but nobody was picking up. Replacing the handset to pace again, she cursed under her breath and filled her growing fear and frustration with being busy.
She cleaned her kitchen, then tried the number again. No answer.
She scoured the Littlewoods catalogue until she found the replacement home telephone she would ask her husband ever so nicely for. She would tell him how tiresome it was to call him at work with that silly old dial phone, and then fix him with her best look, where her eyelashes fluttered ever so slightly, and he would see that as some indication of nuptial promise.
She could get anything out of him when he got that look in his eye, and all the nice things in her home were the result of individual manipulations.
Just as her stress and worry started to become the first inklings of panic, a screech of tyres and a crash sounded from outside. Running out of the front door, she saw her husband’s Volvo parked at an angle on the driveway and her own car shunted diagonally as he had hit the front wing. Gasping loudly, as much for the new car as at the fate of her husband, Sally ran to him and saw instantly that something was wrong.
He was sweating profusely, his loosened tie and unfastened collar soaked through below his bright red face. He was gasping for breath, his eyes rolling, and she leaned in just as he let out a croaking noise that sounded like he was winded. He shuddered once, made another croaking noise and went still.
Sally screamed his name, pulling open the door and trying in vain to pull him from the car by the hand. She screamed and dropped his hand, seeing that the very tip of his left little finger was missing. The stump ended in a red wound, already dry and scabbed over, and she held her breath to force herself to retain some control before she became useless. She stepped forward again, calling his name loudly and slapping his cheek lightly with her right hand. That hand suddenly stopped moving as he lifted his head again, turned his face and locked his teeth onto her wrist. He bit down hard, breaking the skin and cracking something within the joint to make Sally shriek in agony as she threw her body weight backwards. Landing heavily with her left hand wrapped tightly around her injured right, she looked at her husband with shock, because he had turned to face her and was reaching with both hands, moaning and making a gargling, hissing noise at her.
His eyes were cloudy, his mouth hung open and blood mixed with spittle as it ran from the lower corner of his open maw. Sally rose quickly to her feet, fearing that her husband would attack her again, but her stressed brain finally acknowledged that her husband was still secured inside the car by his seatbelt.
Leaving him where he was, she stumbled back through the open front door and ran her bitten wrist under the cold tap in the kitchen. To her surprise, the wound had already stopped bleeding but felt swollen and hot to the touch. She staggered into the front room, feeling lightheaded, and began to dial the three digits to call for the police, but the length of time it took the dial to return to zero saw her faint to the carpet after the second nine.
Sally’s children had been singing along to the tape deck in Charlotte’s room, and were unaware of the slight commotion downstairs, so they had no warning when their mother opened her milky eyes and followed the sound upstairs to where they played in blissful ignorance.
Later, after she had gorged herself, Sally wandered back down the stairs with the front of her pretty dress sheeted in blood. She walked aimlessly out of the front door, pausing only briefly to look at the thing struggling weakly in the driver’s seat of a Volvo, and walked off, dismissing it as inedible.
~
“Just hurry up so we can get back,” trooper Harris said to Nevin, who was dragging out the task so as to avoid any form of hardship. Nevin chuckled from behind the tree he was using as cover for his squat and made intentionally foul noises with his mouth to annoy Harris.
It worked, as Harris tutted and walked a few paces further away from him.
In the small patch of woodland behind the builders’ yard, a woman in a dirty floral dress with one shoulder pad torn and hanging down her right arm, turned her head slowly towards the sounds. The blood that had covered her front had been washed away by rain, and further degraded by her walking around for three weeks to provide the result of the dress being torn in places that could excite a soldier.
That is, if she didn’t have the clouded-over eyes and pale, mottled grey complexion of a Screecher.
Turning her body to point in the same direction as her face, she emitted a low, gargling hiss and set off towards the source of the noise. When she reached them, she heard two people talking. She didn’t know they were people and her destroyed brain had no way to interpret the noises as defined speech, without the higher functions she had once possessed. She had no cognitive ability, but she was attracted to the sound and the closer she got to the sound the more she could detect movement. With that movement came the smell of the living, and with that smell came an apparent aggression and lust for warm flesh that spurred her instinctively onwards.
“Oh-Jesus-fuck!” Nevin blurted out as he almost fell backwards with unfastened trousers in a desperate bid to locate his personal weapon.
“Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot, Nevin,” Harris snapped at him, finally breaking and deciding to let the troublesome soldier have both barrels. “You just can’t help yourself being a twat, can you? Every fucking time there’s work to do, you find some excuse to piss about and… aargh! You wanker!”
Nevin made desperate noises and pointed behind Harris, who was so annoyed with the man’s stupidity that he ran out of words, dismissed him with a wave of his hand and a noise of disgust and turned away.
Directly into the path of what used to be Sally Crawford.
~
“Last one?” asked the tall man, who had evidently worked at the yard, as he indicated that the room in the truck was all but taken up. Strauss nodded in agreement, then froze as the scream of a grown man in agony ripped the air in two.
The two marines had already set off for the rear of the building at a dead run, followed by Strauss and three others.
Rounding the edge of the building, he swore loudly as he heard the sound of automatic gunfire erupt.
“Hold! Hold!” he screamed, both in frustration at the person firing and at the marines ahead of him, as he had seen the rounds hitting the damp earth ahead of them. The marines had seen it too and threw themselves against the corner of the brick building.
“Hold your fire,” Strauss bellowed, hoping for a response from the person behind the weapon. From the noise, he knew it to be the same Sterling as the one in his hand, but then again, both men he had sent back there were similarly armed. The firing stopped, although more likely caused by an empty magazine than by common sense regaining control, and Strauss took his chance to break cover as he told the others to stay where they were.
He rounded the corner just in time to see Nevin slotting a fresh magazine into the side of his weapon, complete the reload and raise it to his shoulder. Ignoring the risk of a ricochet hitting him, Strauss ran hard at an angle for the rest of the scene to emerge.
He saw Nevin leaning into his weapon as he fired more careful, measured shots. He saw Harris, at least he assumed it was Harris, lying flat on his back and twitching his right boot like a tap dancer. He saw a woman, her modesty unpreserved thanks to the holes torn in her dress and saw fresh blood on her as well as the stains of old blood. He had se
en enough people like that over the last month; normal people lifted from their everyday lives and cursed to wander the earth in a ceaseless search for food. This woman had been pretty. Had obviously cared about her body and her appearance. Now she was riddled with bullets, staggering back upright to her feet and tearing the air in between the gunshots with that awful screeching noise.
Nevin, a third of the way into his second magazine, had still not brought her down. Strauss knew the man, knew that he scored acceptable scores on the range days to qualify on the weapon in his hands, but could only attribute the appalling inaccuracy to fear and panic.
Fear and panic were the weapons of their enemy, and his trooper was more danger to himself and his own side than to the lone, unarmed female Screecher in front of them.
“Cease fire!” he bawled angrily, not caring about the noise, seeing as the automatic fire had likely already attracted every Screecher in the area to their location. Nevin stopped, shaking and wide-eyed as he spun towards Strauss and forgetting the basics of weapon discipline. Inadvertently pointing the barrel of a live weapon at his sergeant’s chest, Nevin watched as the gun was slapped away from his grip.
“Safety that weapon, Trooper,” Strauss spat at him, then took two swift steps forward to spear Sally Crawford upwards through her open mouth and stop her shrieking for good. He didn’t spare her a glance as she fell to slump down, because he was already turning to the reliable man from another crew in his troop.
“Harris? Harris?” he said insistently, “can you hear me?”
The moaning and twitching man moved his hand away from his face reluctantly before clapping it back to the wound and keening more loudly, hearing the sergeant’s response.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 3