~
The radio in the administrative building of Castlemorton training area rang loud and long, leaving a persistent ringing tone in the ears of the Panzersoldaten of Two Platoon and Hauptmann Hans Wolff, their captain.
He stood, placing the perfectly moulded black beret on his head with its silver emblem of their mounts emblazoned on the badge, he stepped smartly to the telephone and picked it up.
“Ja, Hauptmann Wolff hier,” he said, then frowned and listened, snapping his fingers and gesturing to the soldier nearest him for something to write on. The soldier scrabbled in the top pocket of his green-grey overalls and came up with a pad of paper and a stub of pencil. Wolff nodded and mm-hmm’d along to the voice on the other end of the line as he scratched numbers on the pad.
“Yes, I understand,” he said in accented English, “of course, we will leave immediately. You too. Goodbye.”
Hauptmann Wolff replaced the handset and breathed in deeply. He turned to his senior sergeant, Feldwebel Stefan Beck, and spoke solemnly.
“We have orders,” he said formally in their native language, “we are now in this fight, and we leave immediately. Replace all ammunition with canister rounds, but keep a few high explosive and armour piercing just in case.”
Beck stood and rearranged the crotch of his overalls, as uncomfortable in the clothing as they all were, and growled to clear his throat before the twenty men of their platoon. Four Leopard 2 tank crews and their four support soldiers were all that remained of their unit, who had been displaced from the training grounds in their own country by the tanks of the American and British squadrons. The huge spit of land in south Wales had reluctantly been their home, but at least it gave them the chance to hone their skills, driving and maintaining their beloved second generation Leopard tanks in that eager and perverse hope of every young soldier that they would get to see active service, and prove to everyone, but mostly to themselves, that they were a fine instrument of modern warfare.
“Wolfsrudel,” Beck shouted, seeing all of their men smiling and bracing as he used the German for the Wolfpack, “weggetreten!”
Wolff watched as the men did as they were told and fell out to their duties, wearing grins as wide as the tracks of their tanks, and turned to his senior NCO.
“Beck,” he said, with a slightly admonishing tone, “do try to remember not to call them that in front of our British allies, won’t you?”
Beck, not dissuaded in the slightest, assured his officer that he would not call their men Wolfpack again. It was a term of endearment, of pride in their commander and fostered a strong sense of belonging. The problem was that the allies would remember the Germans who roamed the Atlantic in packs of U-Boats, and those memories would still be vivid.
“What’s the mission, Sir?” he asked the captain hopefully.
“We head east then south. There is a mass-gathering of the dead ones who are going to cut off the retreat of our allies. For whatever reason, their mission cannot fail, so we are to attack the rear of the enemy.”
“And then?” Beck asked.
“And then we have to kill them all, I imagine.”
~
“Receiving, go ahead,” Captain Palmer said into the radio after command insisted on speaking to the officer commanding the convoy. He frowned, his eyebrows meeting at odd angles as his face gave an unfamiliar betrayal for a man who almost always maintained his professional visage.
“Time to intercept?” he asked, flickering his eyes between his watch and the map on the wall in front of his SSM.
“Shit,” he swore to himself, undetected by anyone inside the rolling armour, before transmitting on the radio again, “Understood. Out.”
He switched channels, transmitting the order to press on with as much speed as possible.
Ahead, at the tip of their column, Maxwell’s Spartan chose that exact moment to emit a loud clattering noise and judder to a tortured stop, causing the wagon behind theirs to hit them hard in the rear and concertina the entire column to a very badly timed halt.
~
Peter had told Amber to hide behind the big chair, told her to stay quiet and out of sight as the noises upstairs grew louder. He ran on small, light feet to the bottom of the stairs to wait the tense moments for the sounds of a moving corpse to reach the top and begin their halting descent to where their instinctive brain heard noises. Those noises denoted food, and food drove the thing’s feet to move and propel it towards that stimulus.
Peter hid behind the tiny protection of the interior wall to be out of sight of whatever was coming, and listened intently trying to hear over the unnaturally loud sound of his own breathing. The footsteps came steadily, rhythmically, as though the creature coming down the staircase was an actual person in full charge of their body, and not the shambolic, jerky actions of a zombie. This realisation made Peter relax and straighten slightly, drawing in a breath to call out a hello. That breath caught in his throat as a new noise drifted around the lower part of the house; that of a gargling, throaty hiss.
At once he knew he had made a mistake. A dangerous mistake, and one that he made because his focus was on the little girl and not on himself. He had never managed to corner himself in a house with one of the faster ones. In fact, he had only encountered them twice and one of those times he had been forced to use the sawn-off shotgun to decapitate the thing. His eyes flashed left to the door, then straight ahead to the chair that Amber was hiding behind, before looking back towards the door. His brain calculated the distances, the time it would take to get her and get out, and his heart dropped in his chest to know that there was no way to get out.
Unthinkingly, he acted as instinctively as the thing coming to investigate their noise and smell.
“Amber! Run, now! Go!” he shouted, his final word becoming drowned out by the ear-shattering screech coming from just the other side of the thin plasterboard wall.
Amber ran, her small feet slipping on the floor and losing her a precious split-second head start. Peter watched her run, his breath held and his mouth open, then his terror doubled in intensity as he realised the one fact he hadn’t accounted for in his escape plan for her.
She reached the door, jumped up and dragged her small fingertips off the locking latch to make it snap back loudly against its spring. The door stayed stubbornly shut and she spun to press her back hard up against the door in paralysing fear as the zombie had emerged from the staircase and locked its clouded eyeballs on her miniature frame and mirrored her wide eyes with its dead ones.
The baggy, pinstriped trousers still had the black and white chequered shirt tucked in, the raised collar skewed and crumpled on one side where a chunk of neck was missing below the floppy mess of unnaturally blonde hair.
Ashen grey lips peeled back from black gums to reveal the contrast of overly-white teeth, and the room filled with the musty smell of old, dry body as it coiled its muscles and bound forward.
The smell was the last straw for Peter.
That instant transportation back to a life which he saw as more dangerous, more claustrophobic and more terrible than the one he now lived, that smell of stale alcohol that made his mind see the woman he hated so much and had killed, but still felt cursed to his very soul for doing so. The memory of his mother made his body move before his mind even processed the emotions.
His mouth opened to emit a strangled cry of fear and rage as his hands came up bearing the pitchfork, which he instinctively aimed at the base of the zombie’s skull. His legs propelled him towards it with a few short steps before his left foot stretched out exaggeratedly to provide the thrust with the instinctive power it needed to penetrate the flesh and sinew and save them both.
As that foot went forward to drive his body weight into the killing blow, his toes caught on the corner of the rug and pitched him downwards instead of up.
Chapter 23
Palmer was bombarded with information via radio, learning for the first time that the stranded convoy was directly in the p
ath of a swarm bigger than the one that had formed in the city, and double the size of the one they had encountered a few weeks before, during the battle of the bridge. That information made the confident young officer’s face go more than a little pale and sagged his posture. Johnson watched from the corner of his eye as he pretended to study the map wall before him, noting that the captain’s right hand trembled.
The tremble was small, but evidently uncontrollable. Deciding not to wait for the intelligence to come to him second-hand, he switched the channel of his own headset to listen in to the conversation. Hadlington’s precise but peevish voice filled his headphones and a surreptitious glance at Daniels on the radio beside him showed that the corporal was also listening. Catching Johnson’s disapproving eye, he subtly switched back to the convoy channel and listened to the organisation of Maxwell as he cleared out the obstruction to assess the mechanical failure of his own wagon.
“We are pending approval for helicopter rescue, and other armoured resources are on their way to you from your north west,” Hadlington reported, leaving out the somewhat salient fact that there would not be sufficient helicopters to extract the entire force, “We estimate that your time until interception is less than an hour, if you can get moving immediately.”
Palmer’s eyes flickered again over the map, figuring out where the convoy would be at that time. He didn’t like his estimate.
“Wait one,” he said into the radio and turned to Johnson.
“One hour from here puts us where, SSM?”
Johnson already knew the answer, just as Palmer did.
“It puts us at or near the island. Too close for comfort,” he said solemnly.
“So we risk endangering the lives of everyone there,” Palmer thought out loud.
“ETA for aircraft extraction for precious cargo?” he asked into the radio.
“Three-five, thirty-five minutes, over,” came the response. Captain and Squadron Sergeant Major looked at one another and exchanged a silent moment of understanding. The mission. The lives of everyone on the island. Undeniably more important to the bigger picture than their small detachment. Johnson nodded to the officer, who swallowed and transmitted again.
“Send helicopter evac,” he said, “convoy will stay in the open so as not to bring the swarm to your location. Out.”
~
The noise that four Leopard 2 tanks made, rolling over the M4 motorway bridge spanning the River Severn, was stunning. They pushed hard, demonstrating that they controlled one of the fastest main battle tanks on the planet at the time, and stopped outside Bristol to refuel from the large wagon following them. The troop had brought their entire fighting strength as well as their own replenishments, and Wolff thought it infinitely more sensible to pause and refuel before they came within sight and smell of the enemy.
Turning south and avoiding the sprawling city entirely, they rolled onwards, encountering larger concentrations of shambling zombies as they progressed. These walking corpses weren’t always walking; some crawled with damaged or missing legs, others hobbled onwards with mechanical injuries which slowed them down too much to keep up with the main herd that couldn’t be seen yet. The only indication that they were ahead was the distant cloud of dust that marked the southern horizon, kicked up by so many thousand pairs of feet, all trudging onwards with some as yet unfathomed common purpose.
Hauptmann Wolff, captain of the troop and breaking convention by commanding the leading tank, told his men to ignore the stragglers and press on through them to the main body of the enemy. Pressing on through, quite literally, the support truck following on behind the tanks drove over swathes of oily mess caused by the crushed bodies, and the men in the passenger seats of those trucks took only necessary shots from their G3 assault rifles against those zombies that posed a threat to them. The men in the tanks ahead had no space for the long rifles, so instead carried Uzi machine pistols for personal defence, should they need to dismount. Their main tool for dispatching the massed dead would be their main 120mm guns and the canister rounds they carried.
When the stragglers became an obstacle in themselves, Wolff scanned the ground ahead for a space wide enough to spread his tanks out and bring their four guns to bear on the mass, which was already beginning to take an interest in the sound and movement behind it. Having thought ahead in his own analytical way, Wolff ordered the four tanks to halt and disperse, then load high explosive rounds into their guns. Unlike their British allies, they didn’t have to follow the projectile with a full bag charge for maximum effect and range, as they had the more advanced single-piece ammunition which made their rate of fire slightly superior. He planned to stall the massive crowd with four large explosions, and make them the centre of attention to divert their collective attention back north instead of south, where his orders had informed him they must be prevented from doing so.
“Halt,” he called into the radio in their native language, waiting as his next orders were followed and the tanks dispersed into a loose lateral line, “targets to your front. Fire.”
Four huge, concussive booms rolled out over the lush landscape, answered by the responding explosions of their high-yield munitions as four brilliant fireballs erupted in the distance.
“Now,” Wolff said seriously into the radio, “we have their attention.” The men in his own tank smiled, as he hoped the others would be doing.
“Load with canister, staggered fire by numbers, stand by,” he ordered in crisply efficient German, watching as his own loader opened the breech and slid in the munition, which appeared the same as a very large bullet. The other tanks reported ready to fire, and Wolff ordered them to illuminate their headlights and fire smoke grenades on his instruction.
“Deploy smoke screen in three, two, one, fire!”
As one, the northern skyline from the perspective of the zombies erupted with a series of eight pops to gout billowing smoke. Almost the rear third of the huge gathering had already turned to investigate the explosions, and perhaps a further ten percent of them now responded to the smoke screen display, to hiss and screech as they turned to investigate.
“Canister to your front at intervals,” Wolff said calmly, “on my mark.”
Then came the agonising wait as the zombies had to be allowed time to approach for their evil and destructive munitions to be fully effective. Wolff watched through his optics, gauging the moment to be just right, and fired the first round himself from his commander’s override controls.
The muzzle of their long gun erupted in smoke and flame, recoiling violently to spew the contents of the canister directly into the path of the oncoming horde. The weapon itself, although modernised and made more lethal over time, had not changed much since its inception some time in the sixteenth century. Deployed against infantry, it was brutally effective as instead of firing single projectiles, the canister disintegrated as it was fired and spread the contents of hundreds of tungsten bolts towards the enemy, and it then fanned out to wreak havoc and death like a hideous and gigantic shotgun.
The four rounds of canister were fired in staggered intervals in order that a fresh wave of dead filled the front rank before the next shot was sent out, and not wasted into already ruined bodies. It fanned outwards to rip bloody holes through the first three or four ranks, before the kinetic energy of their multiple projectiles was spent.
The tanks fired with their barrel only slightly elevated past the horizontal, as their expected advance would bring them perilously close to the maximum depression of the barrels and force a retreat in order to keep them at bay. Their coaxial MG3 machine guns could be brought to bear in closer quarters, but sustained fire with these guns had proved to require a change of barrels after an uncomfortably short time in comparison to the British alternative in their GPMG. Of all the NATO countries, most had dropped the use of canister anti-infantry ammunition in favour of the armour-killing sabot kinetic rounds, or armour piercing munitions developed to beat the improved armour of the Russian T-80 main battl
e tank. The Germans’ reluctance to withdraw that ammunition had been a fortuitous advantage against their unexpected enemy.
Wave after wave of the dead fell in bloody ruin as great gouts of red mist filled the air above their shattered and dismembered bodies. Some unlucky ones nearer the front caught multiple pieces of the machined shrapnel and seemed to simply disintegrate as parts of their bodies vanished under the onslaught of metal.
Round after round they fired, each report attracting more and more of the undead to turn and investigate the sounds, but the simple mathematics of the equation had never been in their favour. As devastating as their combined firepower was, as many shattered and ruined bodies they threw back with each efficient shot, the tide turned against them.
“Back, back!” Wolff called over the radio as his gunner fired their last shot at maximum depression. The tanks began to roll backwards and bring the front ranks back into their killing fields, but the progress only ramped higher in intensity as the faster ones towards the front of the horde forced their way through to the rear, and pressed out ahead of the mass.
Wolff engaged the MG under his control, barking out rapid bursts of heavy machine gun fire at the smooth motorway tarmac at the feet of the faster ones, for the bullets to bounce back up and graze along, cutting off legs and shattering ankles to stop the advance. Faster they reversed, outpacing the attack and firing relentlessly with all four big smoothbore guns spitting metal and death, as their accompanying twin machine guns rattled away at the enemy.
The tide turned in favour of the living as that fresh wave went down and the slower ones following their lead were forced to climb over the mound of dead that marked the limit of the guns. The tanks pressed forwards, elevating their barrels to scour the lip of that barrier of dead flesh, to be scattered away until the skyline ahead was suddenly empty.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 19