“A massive crowd of them came through,” she went on, her eyes staring at a spot of nothing on the floor, “they literally shook the houses there were so many of them. More of them came on behind for about a day, like they were late to the party, and two of them must have smelled us or something because they camped outside and just kept walking into the front door like it would magically open for them. I threw a load of things out of the back window, you know, to try and get them to go away, and it worked. The microwave made a massive noise and they loved that. It gave us just enough time to get out of the front door and into the car…”
She sniffed again, wiping away the fresh tears of memory with her cuffs.
“We got about two miles out of town when I ran over a few of them at once and the car got stuck. We had to run and leave the car.”
She stopped talking, never taking her eyes away from the spot she was staring at, as if it was the invisible anchor tethering her to reality no matter how harsh it was. Pauline waited to see if the pause was an intentional one, then decided to prompt for more.
“What happened?”
Clare’s head snapped up to meet Pauline’s gaze, startling her slightly with her sudden alertness and a fire behind her eyes that quickly extinguished itself.
“What happened?” she spat, “we were doing fine, that’s what happened. We moved around a short distance at a time and Am…” the word, the name, seemed to catch in her throat, “my baby was doing really well; she never made a noise to attract them. Then these,” she pushed herself up on her hands and shouted, “fucking bastards, came and dragged me away from her.”
She buried her head into her knees and sobbed again for a long time until the reserves of tears ran dry again. She raised her head, the same vacant, capitulating look in her eyes.
“My beautiful baby, my Amber, she’s gone now. There’s no way she’d be able to survive on her own,” she intoned flatly.
Pauline didn’t know what to say, but blessedly the door banged open and a man stood in the doorway.
“Time for work,” he said, leering as Pauline stood and smoothed down her clothes. As she passed by, she reached out a hand and placed the lightest touch of her fingertips on Clare’s knee.
~
Pauline Earle, widow and manager at a historical site with its own hotel, had been rounded up early on after the world fell apart. She had survived the initial phase of apocalyptic proceedings on simple geography, sheer luck alone, as her modest home was part of the hotel-cum-museum on the windswept seafront on high ground far from the town. She’d lived there ever since her husband had passed away, selling their house and accepting the job with its accommodation and company. There, she’d anxiously watched the news reports as she sat alone on the day when only two of the employees arrived for work to care for the single pair of guests present.
In her unthinking panic, she had stopped off via the village shop a few miles from her home, and for a week she lived on the overstocked amount of bread and milk that her subconscious brain forced her to buy.
She had nothing to drink in the house, not that she ever drank much anyway, and wouldn’t think of going to the hotel wing to drink their stocks. The stress of the situation made her think of turning to alcohol for a solution. It was probably a good idea she hadn’t found anything, as that night she saw the first one of them. Had she drunk most of a bottle of wine as she felt like doing, she probably would have gone outside to investigate and ask why they were trespassing. She probably wouldn’t have noticed the curious way they were walking, their jerky movements and the way that the head snatched from side to side whenever different sounds echoed around her little hilltop haven. That decision not to drink, the possession of her full faculties, inevitably saved her life as she made the choice not to go out there. She had stayed frozen still in the window and watched as the thing walked up to the glass and banged its face into the rain-smeared pane. Pauline gasped in horror, unable to move through a morbid fascination and fear, and couldn’t believe it when a bird flew down to land lightly on the grass nearer the sea. The thing in front of her, wearing a green waterproof and walking gear with one gaiter torn away above its right boot to show a ragged chunk of blackened flesh missing, turned and watched intently as the bird hopped along. It lurched towards the cliff edge, head cocked to one side and hands reaching out for the pastel-grey dove as it went about its business, undisturbed by events unfolding in the wider world. It remained utterly undisturbed until almost too late when the sudden burst of movement behind it forced a panicked leap out over the edge of the drop towards the sea and freedom. The person, the thing, chasing the dove fell headlong over the edge and made Pauline shriek out loud in shock. She ran outside, lay flat on the damp, windswept grass to peer over the edge and saw the body only thirty feet down and stuck in grotesque parody of a ballerina with legs and arms broken in different directions. The face showed that it recognised her appearance, and a shriek rang from the mouth in between the snapping of teeth. She almost thought to try the telephone again to bring help, until her mind registered what her eyes had seen. The face looked up at her, full of malice and hate, but the body was still face down on the rocks. Only then did she realise what the world was facing.
Three days passed by without any updates on the static screen of her television, and a nervous young man working in the hotel knocked on the door of her small cottage to ask if she would join them for a meeting. The meeting, such as it was, comprised Pauline and two young local men who worked there, and the couple of guests who had been caught out while on a walking holiday along their famous Jurassic coastline. The silence had been awkward, the introductions stilted, until they started to relax around one another and they all agreed that they had to shed the bounds of normality and wait at the hotel for the whole unpleasant business to all be over.
That bubble of British stoicism burst spectacularly when one morning about a week after the televisions stopped broadcasting, three men drove arrogantly up to the very front of the main entrance to the visitors’ centre of the historical hilltop monument and ruins. They walked around, appearing to be conducting an appraisal, apparently liking what they saw. Pauline looked out of her window, barely able to hear the exchange of words with the two employees who walked out of the front door of the hotel to greet the visitors.
Pleasantries were given and received, hands were shaken, and questions asked.
Questions that, at least in their current suspicious frame of mind, would raise the alarm.
Questions like how many people were there, what supplies they had and what weapons were in the building.
Questions which, when answered, prompted the bearded man loitering by his car to turn and wave his hands in an exaggerated gesture down the hill. The five members of the reluctant group who had yet to realise the cruel world they lived in watched in confusion. That confusion turned into fear and disbelief as the noise of a loud engine rattled up the hill to them. The throttle surged, whistling and growling in peaks and dipping low to rise up again until the most unexpected sight burst into view.
A tank. A dark green tank with wide, irregular swathes of black and brown painted over it. The tank, so unnatural and out of place in the idyllic setting, was followed by half a dozen other vehicles including two vans and a digger, forming a ragtag collection that oozed danger. The tank stopped, the engine rattled into silence, and a hatch opened to let a man climb out. Everyone watched in terrified awe as he jumped lightly down, holding a machine gun with a long magazine sticking out of the left side horizontally. He held the weapon by the grip in his left hand, letting it swing casually and recklessly. Everything about him screamed a warning of violence and cruelty. As if to compound the implied sense of doom, the man surveyed the area.
And smiled crookedly.
~
The next few weeks were tough. Every room was thoroughly searched and ransacked for the items the half dozen men wanted, and the carefully maintained grounds of the historic site were systematical
ly ruined as the centuries-old defences were deepened and widened in their neat rings which had once been dug to the same depth and width to prevent Vikings from reaching the hill top.
One of the reasons that site was so important, and had been for as long as humans had graced the south coast, was that the hilltop had its own natural water spring. The Anglo-Saxons of Wessex could hold that hilltop for a fortnight with only two hundred and fifty men, given that they only had to carry their weapons and food on their backs, and they could not be starved out easily. Each day, the besieging army would be forced to raid further and further away for their own food and water.
Each day those besiegers sat impotently at the bottom of the hill meant another boat crew melting away for easier spoils, or prompted impatient men into ill-conceived attempts on the steep hill.
Fast forward to their current war, their plight against the violent invaders of today, and the routine had not changed much, other than the defenders now had a small hotel and visitors’ centre to keep them comfortable. They also had the added bonus of a vast underground store of heating oil, installed when the visitors’ centre had the gift shop added about a decade before.
What they didn’t have was a food supply, but the daily runs sent out in cars and vans brought back more than enough, and about one in five outbound cars brought back someone new. Those new people were in varying states of dishevelment, and not all of them seemed totally willing to be there. Anyone coming back in via the single-track road that led up to the ruins and the buildings would find themselves staring down the barrel of the tank for an unnervingly long time.
It wasn’t a tank, not in the sense that most people associated with the main battle tanks synonymous with the military might of each country, but it was in fact one of the newly introduced Warrior tracked fighting vehicles. It was a bigger version of the tracked vehicles the Yeomanry used in their assault reconnaissance troop, with the addition of the brutal 30mm cannon from the Fox and a section to carry infantry like the Saxons.
It was better armoured, more mechanically reliable, but it had one flaw according to the man who had driven it there. One small part of the wagon that was inferior to the older vehicles they had been invented to replace. The new chain gun, which fired the same 7.62 as the GPMGs, was prone to jamming and had a far slower rate of fire than the tried and tested weapon it was due to replace.
The man who had driven it there, the man with the machine gun. The one with the cruel eyes who had made the unwilling acquaintance of most of the women there already, who gave his orders to other people to follow, and dished out their rewards like some petty Lord. He didn’t mix with many of them, electing instead to stay inside the biggest room in the hotel, which he had taken over as his own space, and he only kept company when he wanted it.
He demanded company, and the implied threat meant that he didn’t have to force himself on anyone. They were protected by him. He kept them all safe and they didn’t have to go out where the monsters were, but that protection obviously came at a price, which they willingly paid, wearing false smiles so that everything stayed amicable.
Pauline was spared those unwelcome attentions, as there were younger women who caught his eye before her. For that she was both relieved and grateful, yet felt guilty and responsible that others had to endure being used when she was left alone.
Michaels. That was what the others called him. He occasionally went out, but other men were left there in charge. None of them would ever think of trying to depose their self-styled leader, mainly because he was the only man who knew things.
Things like how to get into an army camp and find guns. Things like the exact building that contained a gleaming new tank, and even more miraculously, how to start it up and drive it out. Even more mind-bendingly, he knew where the ammunition was that the cannon took, and after he had stared at the racks where it was stored for a long time and counted the empty sections with his fingers, he selected ones with glossy black tips as he muttered to himself.
He filled the rear section with the two rows of horizontal seats with box upon box of ammunition of various types and calibre. He added to that other pieces of equipment and tools, fitted himself with a belt that had straps over each shoulder and multiple pouches, and drew the bayonet from the sheath to check its edge.
When they were equipped to his requirements and ready to leave the army camp, one of the two men he had recruited to assist him asked, “Why don’t we just bust our way out of here?”. They were sitting in the rear seats, the position of the gunner and commander, with strict instructions not to touch anything as Michaels drove.
“Because,” he said, dragging out the word into the headset that linked them over the rumble and roar of the engine and tracks, “we don’t want anyone to know we’ve been here, and if we need to come back it would be nice if the place wasn’t full of dead people because some idiot drove through the gate instead of opening it. Dickhead.”
So they had left the camp and the nearby ammunition dump as though nobody had been there, and when the army had returned they failed to notice the missing vehicle and the ammunition taken from the rearmost sections away from the entrance.
Now that Warrior, that dominant vehicle that was impervious to almost anything other than the mighty Chieftain tanks miles away down the coast, sat hidden in the ruins of the old fort, partially obscured by a collapsed wall of heavy stone, and camouflaged the rest of the way using cut branches. Unless anyone approaching in a vehicle knew it was there, they would be well within deadly range of the 30mm cannon for far too long to make any assault anything other than a bloodbath or one-sided losses.
They were nestled in, and they had no intention of being dug out.
Chapter 13
The first morning they woke up together, the two children sat up and looked at each other awkwardly. They had slept remarkably well given the tumultuous events of the previous day, but the morning air was chilly thanks to the small, high window they had left open during the night.
They hadn’t noticed the cold when they slept wrapped up inside a double duvet each, but now that they were out of those cocoons they shivered in the cool air. Still, the cost of leaving that window open was repaid by what it had brought back to them in the darkness.
The yellow eyes, the black and brown mottled fur and its eager, expectant look; the cat stood and stretched up to arch its back, before sitting down and turning its head far to the right to desperately lick behind its own shoulder blade, then stopping just as rapidly to look at them again.
Peter and Amber looked at each other, both wearing small smiles, then back at the cat, who regarded them with its big eyes that closed in slow blinks as the loud rattle of a purr wound itself back up to full volume. Amber held a single finger out to it, giggling as the cat pushed itself forward to rub the entire length of its left side along the digit and spin delicately in front of her face to look at Peter.
This had the unwelcome side effect of placing its back end with the upturned tail directly in Amber’s face and making her lean back to move her eyes away from the display. They both laughed softly, and the cat looked at them both in turn to show them it was unimpressed to the extent that it was almost ashamed of them.
Peter had never had a cat, mostly because any cat hanging around the farm would be seen as food by the working dogs that walked obediently at the heels of their masters. He decided that he liked this cat, as presumptuous and intrusive as it was, and held out his own finger towards it. Shuffling the position of all four paws, it carefully balanced to reach out one paw and try to span the expanse between the two settees to step across.
Try as it might, it had no possible way of extending a single paw to bridge the gap of at least two feet and still make it, but that didn’t stop the ridiculous, wobbling display of balance until the realisation finally dawned on it and it stepped lightly down to leap back up on Peter’s side, and purr loudly as it snaked its body up and down his hand. Both children smiled at the display, not reali
sing that they were being manipulated into providing more food, just as they had done the previous night.
From the cat’s perspective, two people had arrived and didn’t scream at it and try to catch it, and they fed it. The biggest draw for the cat was that these two, even if they were small, were warm and smelt like people instead of dead things.
Peter stood and stretched, slipping his arms into a sweatshirt that was too big for him after being liberated from a house he couldn’t remember being inside. He stepped lightly over the cold floor of the kitchen and looked over the contents arrayed on the worktop, as he always did when he cleared a house. He found tinned meatballs, cans of soup that promised to be thick and creamy, and dried pasta.
He thought, then stepped quickly and quietly to the stairs, where he carefully peered through the windows front and back to be sure that there were no monsters loitering in the street. He couldn’t be sure if any of the houses were nests, like the two he had discovered by bad luck, and only survived through a moment of good luck, but a decent indication of those places was a wide open front door.
Deciding to risk it, as he was now bizarrely responsible for not only a kid but apparently a cat too, he returned to the kitchen and ran a pan of water from the tap. When the pan was half-full, the water began to cough a splutter from the pipe as though air was trapped in there somehow, and then it stopped altogether. Peter set down the pan and frowned.
Going through the cupboards, he found another container and went to the other tap in the house in the main bathroom upstairs. He managed to fill most of that smaller pan, which in itself was deceptive, since being smaller, it held much less water anyway, and he carried it carefully downstairs.
Amber was watching him in silence, crossing her legs and leaning forward to wear a look of discomfort. Peter saw this, recognised the look, and in that same moment realised that the girl had been conditioned into this violent new world and would not pee without being told it was safe to do so. He held out a hand to her, beckoning her towards him, and pointed her towards the toilet.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 11