Her words were full of regret and annoyance, but any response Pauline could make was stopped by the knock at the door.
The two women looked at each other before Clare shrugged, and Pauline shouted for whoever it was to come in.
One of the first men to turn up there stood in the doorway, not stepping inside, and politely asked for Clare to come with him.
“Why?” she shot back, full of venom.
“Because our Boss would like to talk to you,” he responded.
Pauline expected more anger, more revolt and even imagined them having to drag the woman out of the room, but Clare simply stood, brushed off the crumbs from her dirty and stained clothes, and followed him.
Clare walked tall, pride and anger keeping her from unravelling. She was shown to the door of the big hall in the historical building and the man who had escorted her there gestured for her to go inside. That was evidently as far as he was taking her.
She walked in, looking around at the high ceilings and decorated walls, and a voice cut through to her.
“Good afternoon,” came a man’s voice from her right. She looked to see a man of average height and build, with an unremarkable face. His voice had nothing unique about it either, but there was something intangible about the man that made him appear strong. He didn’t ooze malevolence or physically dominate her; in fact he kept a respectful distance as he spoke.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, “but I know a simple apology won’t help you at all. Believe me when I say that I know the loss you feel right now…” He gestured to an ornate chair beside one that he took, inviting her to sit with him. She sat, her face a mask of neutrality.
“I want you to know that I sent men back to where you were and had them search until they were forced to come back, but they found no sign of her. My own daughter was lost very early on,” he said with eyes turned down, “even before most people realised what was happening. We’d been visiting family near Portsmouth and, well, I don’t need to tell you…”
“I’m very sorry,” Clare said, seeing him look up to smile at her. That smile faded when her face contorted, and she spoke again.
“But your daughter wasn’t left for dead by thugs who knocked her mother out. Your daughter didn’t die alone and terrified. My daughter did. She’s dead because of you,” she finished, spitting the words at him with a jab of her right index finger. When she had finished, her body betrayed her and brought on angry tears caused by adrenaline, and opened the floodgates once more.
The man sat back and just watched her cry. He didn’t force his words on her, didn’t tell her that the men were simply being clumsy and ham-fisted about following his orders to bring back survivors to the safety of their hill. They had never encountered anyone who didn’t want to be rescued, so the thought never occurred to them that people might want to be left alone. He wanted to say that he would have done things differently, that he would have brought the girl back with them and listened to her, but felt the words were empty so he didn’t say them.
He also didn’t tell her that his men had found a dead zombie in the house, which he doubted a little girl could have achieved. He didn’t tell her that he believed someone had found her before his men had got back to them. She appeared to have decided and accepted that the girl was gone, so he saw no need to drive her insane with renewed hopes and fears, deciding that it was better to let her accept the loss and move on.
“I know there’s nothing I can say to make this better,” he told her, “but you have my word that nothing like this will happen again.”
“You’re right,” she sniffed, “nothing you can say will help.”
With that, she stood and walked from the room with steps that gathered pace until she broke into a run just before the doorway.
The man, John Michaels, leaned back in the chair and sighed. He longed for men who had the intelligence to follow orders, but reminded himself that he had to adapt and work with what he had. The tale about his daughter was true, but he left out some pertinent facts.
Facts such as his daughter turning in the car as he sped home, his wife in the back seat holding her as she convulsed with the fever. He left out that the girl had opened her eyes suddenly and bitten her mother hard, tearing out a golf ball-sized chunk from her neck and sheeting the inside of the car with arterial spray from her torn blood vessels. He didn’t tell her that he had crashed the car in his sudden and terrifying blindness, and that his unrestrained daughter had flown through the windscreen on impact to roll to a bloody and broken mess thirty feet from the wreck. He didn’t tell her that when he came around from the blow to his head, that his wife was reaching for him but unable to do more than hook a single fingernail into his clothing and try to pull him towards her milky eyes and gnashing teeth. He didn’t say that he fell from his car in terror, scrambling backwards on his backside to put distance between himself and the horror. He didn’t say that the horror only grew infinitely worse when a crackling, gargling sound came from the ground behind him and he turned to see his daughter dragging her shattered and twisted frame towards him an inch at a time, as though sheer determination and hunger could force her ruined body to move.
He was ashamed of himself for what he did afterwards, and when he went back over a week later with the resolve to end their perpetual suffering, he found his daughter had moved close to a mile away from where she had last reached out to him. Her minute progress had been unceasing as she followed the direction that her last meal had gone in. He dispatched her, freed her from her useless body, with a single shot to the back of her head from the Browning semi-automatic he had removed from the armoury. He used the same method to kill his wife, shooting her in the temple through the back windscreen of the car as she turned to try and locate the source of the sound. He left their bodies where they were, no longer considering them to have been the people he loved, and satisfied himself that whatever part of them that was left had been set free.
He returned to where he had parked the van he was using and drove back to the place they had fortified, having narrowly avoided being swept away by the massive horde that had inexplicably gathered and stormed across the countryside, leaving filth and destruction in their wake. He used the van because the other vehicle he had scavenged was a little too high profile for everyday use.
He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t reported to the camp, not that he had been home to receive the call anyway, and instead, he’d watched it until it was empty and sneaked in to steal weapons and the Warrior tank. He didn’t know why he felt it necessary to abandon his duties, especially seeing as the army was the only family he had left, and the men of his Sabre troop would have been his responsibility as much as his daughter had been.
He decided that he’d had enough of being part of the machine, as he illogically blamed that machine and its masters for his family dying. Instead he drank until he was sick, drank again, and dreamt up a new way of life.
Chapter 15
The alarm went up shortly before three in the morning.
The alarm, such as it was, was the massively loud mechanical, metallic chattering of the coaxial machine gun on the turret of the Chieftain tank blocking the road. The radio sparked to life, fire support was requested, and the standby troops poured from their billets to form up at the threshold between the island and the bridge.
The direction of the enemy was given, and the two Fox cars stationed permanently on the two bluffs of higher ground erupted into life as they added their own bursts of automatic fire to the fray.
Sergeant Horton, taking his turn to sleep in the tank with all but the commander’s hatch down to preserve their heat in the dead of night, was woken by the two members of his crew who were awake and taking turns to look through their handheld optics to stare at the empty roadway. Only at that time it suddenly wasn’t empty.
The thin tripwire rigged at the far end activated the flares attached to the bridge with an echoing pop to bathe the area in a soft glow.
The
reticuled display hazed into a grainy collection of shapes as a stumbling, shuffling group of zombies materialised, making the man babble a string of incoherent noises in surprise before he got his brain into gear and snatched up the controls of the weapon to stitch a burst of 7.62 into them.
The two sleeping men, one being the tank’s commander, leapt instantly to life and in seconds, the second machine gun on the tank rattled out its own shots.
Horton looked through the optics, snatched up the radio and called the two Fox cars. Within thirty seconds, their two guns added a devastating additional weight and the impetus of the advance had been halted. The optics flared brightly as the standby force behind them had set up and fired a 51mm illuminating mortar round, which sank slowly through the air behind the onslaught, showing it to number well over a hundred.
With four guns firing on them, the slow-moving infantry of the dead found their attack ‘rendered safe’ in less than a minute, but that didn’t mean the island defenders were out of the woods straightaway.
As the guns stopped when no further targets remained standing, Captain Palmer emerged wearing his camouflaged trousers and boots, with a white PT shirt under his webbing that was still unfastened. He had a Browning pistol in the holster on his belt, his Sterling sub-machine gun in his hands with the bayonet already fixed in place. The man must have woken, dressed and been ready to fight inside of thirty seconds to make it to the bridge before the firing had fully stopped. Directly behind him came Lieutenant Lloyd, similarly dressed and equally ready to bring the fight to their enemy.
“Five of yours, five of mine?” he asked Lloyd, who nodded and shouted five names into the night to have his marines come to him. Palmer turned to look at the men of the Yeomanry, picking out the first five men that he knew by name. The twelve men stepped up, fixed bayonets and readied themselves, as Palmer turned to the men of Maxwell’s assault troop who had set up their mortar.
“Hold, just stand by with an illumination round,” he told them, not waiting for a response but turning back to his assembled team, “bayonets, unless you see obvious bullet wounds to the head, then you make damn sure before you step close to them. One in the head, dump them off the road and stay close to each other.”
They waited, staring off into the dark past the tank that they trusted, to keep their night optics trained on the approach. After an hour and a half, the sun began to rise off to their right. In that time, others had come to check the situation, and everyone not directly needed was sent away. They didn’t go far, and one of the men even returned to the officer’s quarters and fetched Palmer’s uniform smock for him. When the sun had risen enough, he turned to his team and addressed them.
“Ready?”
They were.
“Let’s go,” he said, calling up to the now-open hatches of the tank to give the order to cease fire. Horton confirmed the order with a thumbs-up gesture and watched as the twelve men went to work.
Palmer spread them out in a line, calling for a slow approach to the first of them which lay face down. The back of its skull was missing, indicating that the body posed no risk to them by then. It, she, was kicked off the side of the roadway to drop and splash into the water below. They moved carefully, never taking chances with the unmoving ones, and making sure with those still squirming with whatever intact body parts they still possessed. None of them was fast moving enough to make the soldiers fire a shot, and the only burst of adrenaline came from the time when a knot of them had fallen on top of a smaller one who was freed after the weight fell away.
A smaller one, that was a better way to say it.
Having rendered safe a smaller one was far easier to live with, made it slightly better when sleeping at night, instead of saying that they had killed a child. It went down to the bayonet of a marine with the slightly longer reach of his rifle and was sent over the edge with the others in uncomfortable silence.
The sun was fully up when their exhausted group filed back through the small gap made by the tank, and just then the sky above the sea filled with the sound of helicopters.
Rushing back over the bridge, the twelve men were subjected to a rapid body search to establish no wounds, then allowed to carry on into the island as per their revised standing orders.
Chapter 16
Shortly after dawn the island, or at least those not already woken by the earlier gunfire, was woken by the shatteringly-loud noise of helicopters swooping in and hovering to land. Johnson, expecting the early morning arrivals as he was privy to the information, was alarmed as many others were from where they toiled near the bridge. He craned his neck up towards the higher round where the only flat, open space large enough to accommodate the aircraft lay. He allowed himself a crooked smile as he watched the two recognisable silhouettes of a pair of Sea Kings dropping in. The other silhouette was unique, and made his mouth hang open slightly. The aircraft had been escorted by another helicopter that hovered high over the island in overwatch. An Apache, with its stubby wings sprouting pods of rockets, loomed almost malevolently in the air as the two transport helicopters disgorged their contents.
As the two aircraft rose to take off only thirty seconds after landing, with their engines notes dialling up intensity, another helicopter flew in from the direction of the sea, only this time it was the profile of a Bell. Johnson wasn’t knowledgeable enough to tell who it belonged to, but had to guess that it was American. That helicopter flew directly over them heading inland, and when the Sea Kings had turned their noses back out to sea to fly away, the Apache moved from its unnervingly steady hover, dipped its own nose, and followed the Bell.
Frowning, Johnson walked towards the headquarters building and prepared for the influx of experts.
The Bedford truck that had been coaxed up the steep roads in anticipation of bringing down their new guests returned to the lower slopes shortly after the air had returned to still silence. The canvas flap at the back was in its normal position of up, and a small unit of camouflaged uniformed soldiers hopped down and retrieved various heavy kit bags and weapons.
The last man down, crisply uniformed and moustached, with thickly-rimmed glasses between moustache and beret, strode to Johnson and waited for a salute.
The SSM’s eyes ran over the insignia, the crowned rose, and the crowns on the shoulders.
“Sir,” he said as he drew himself up to attention and saluted briefly.
“Squadron Sergeant Major Johnson, I presume?” said the man as he returned the salute in acknowledgment.
“Yessir.”
“Major Hadlington,” he said smoothly before unnecessarily adding, “Intelligence Corps.”
Johnson had known in less than a heartbeat that the man was a major, and that he was Green Slime through and through from the insignia and the look of him. Johnson, like just about every member of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces employed in a combat arm, had a deep mistrust of the intelligence corps and often made the common jest about ‘army intelligence’ being the world’s biggest oxymoron. The corps had only recently been bumped up from being a support arm into a combat support arm, and although the difference sounded small, it served to elevate the men and women of the intelligence corps from rear-echelon to something closer to the sharp end of the spear, in their eyes.
He knew that elevation was due to the work they had evolved into ‘over the water’ and he had met a few of them who were part of something known simply as ‘the detachment’, which was their elite counter-terrorist surveillance unit. The men, and women, he reminded himself, of those units were respected and revered in certain circles, because they put their lives on the line just as the troops on the ground did.
The one thing that Johnson was wrong about, was his guess that the moustached major would have a double-barrelled name. He was expecting something utterly Etonian like the Simpkins-Palmer boys he had to endure, then felt a stab of guilt for thinking that, as only one of those men was a useless fop of an aristocrat in his book.
Major Raymond Hadlingt
on, while in possession of the breeding and accent associated with the mockery of the enlisted ranks, was a hard-working man who demanded precision and efficiency from those under his command. He felt that he had the right to demand this, as he led by example. His team, some of whom he had worked with previously, had been working effectively from their cramped quarters on board the Royal Navy frigate.
Their panicked flight from their base in Germany two weeks previously, as the fence line was swarmed by a flowing, roiling mass of corpses, was still fresh in their collective minds. As was the helicopter ride that evacuated them minutes before the fence collapsed and the dead poured inside.
That desperate escape was another story, and not one that Hadlington wanted to remember, because to him it signalled that the army had abandoned the continent that held the majority of their forces.
Being a major in the intelligence arena, he was far from the mushroom status of most force personnel, who claimed to be kept permanently in the dark and fed bullshit. He knew that continental Europe was all but gone, and he knew that the Soviets were unleashing hell on the eastern borders to stop the flow of infected bodies walking over the expanse of land borders, with flight after flight of bombers laying waste to the hordes.
To the west, the Americans stopped all traffic heading in their direction, and ran near constant aerial surveillance by using two of their AWACS, refuelled in mid-air with as many personnel on board as they could manage. The drain on that constant air surveillance had been alleviated with the arrival of the US carrier fleet. Hadlington was also hearing rumours that forces were being dispatched to Iceland, and they had even struck some kind of deal with the remaining Spanish government surviving on their cluster of islands off the western coast of Africa to begin sending vessels and aircraft. Seeing as the islands had shut their borders entirely, allowing the US forces to take over the airports in exchange for the promise of financial reparations was an easy decision for them to make.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 13