The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 1)

by Luke Duffy

  Bull looked around at his immediate surroundings. He noticed the limbs and other body parts that still had the unmistakable rebel style clothing and regalia that the militias always liked to adorn themselves with, still clinging to them. Bangles and necklaces with the usual symbols of witchcraft, given to them by their tribal witch doctors to protect them from bullets and harm. T-shirts, with western rock groups and diamante encrusted skull designs. Aviator sunglasses and bandanas…

  They were all there.

  The rebels were all around them, torn to pieces and scattered through the camp and the surrounding jungle.

  None of it made sense. Rebels dismembered and civilians with festering wounds and gunshots to the head.

  All around the perimeter fence, countless footprints could be seen, all headed into the camp from every angle. It appeared that the civilians, possibly from a local village, had decided to neutralise the threat that had taken up camp on their doorstep. It was the only explanation, as far as Stan could see, and he suddenly felt a great deal of admiration for their bravery, but he had never heard of anything like that happening before.

  He heard a clicking noise, he turned to see Bull, and Marty, walking in a crouch with their weapons at the ready, both headed towards a collapsed tent connected to a structure made from bamboo. Bull was holding out his hand, snapping his fingers to get the attention of the rest of the team, while he kept his eyes to his front, taking careful steps as he drew closer.

  Stan and the remainder did not need an explanation, and immediately raised their rifles, covering their arcs and their friends as they closed in on potential danger. Bull had seen or heard something, and that was all that they needed to know for the moment.

  Bobby and Taff pushed out to the left, ensuring that their flank was protected, while Danny and Brian pushed to the right. The team was now fanned out into a base line, ready to send a devastating amount of firepower into anything they perceived as a threat.

  Bull, just a couple of metres away from his objective, paused for a moment and nodded to Marty, signalling him to be ready and to cover him.

  They had both heard the noise; a low groan and the sound of a body moving in the sucking mud beneath the canvas sheeting. It was unmistakable and they knew that someone was in there.

  He stepped closer, the barrel of his Belgian made Minimi machinegun pointed at the centre of the collapsed structure and his finger taking up the first pressure on the trigger. His body was tense, ready to jump into action, or away from harm. Every muscle was taut, filled with oxygenated blood as his heart rate increased his circulation and the adrenalin pumped through his veins.

  From the corner of his eye, he glanced across to Marty and saw the M4 rifle pulled tightly into his friend’s shoulder. His finger was resting on the trigger, and Bull knew that the safety would already have been switched to ‘fire’, with the barrel aimed at the area where Bull’s hand gripped the thick canvas material.

  With a heave, the sheet was ripped back and tossed to the side. Bull released it and grabbed his gun with both hands, ready to open up with a long burst of 5.56mm rounds into whoever was beneath, waiting for him.

  It was a cage.

  Held together with wire and cord, the bamboo structure was no bigger than a metre square. At the bottom of the cage, a dark mound quivered and whimpered in the mire.

  Bull nervously glanced at Marty before taking a step forward and tapping the bars of the enclosure with the barrel of his weapon to gain the attention of the person inside.

  Nothing happened. The shivering form did not react.

  “Hey, you,” he hissed, this time nudging at the bamboo prison with his foot, “can you hear me?”

  The body inside suddenly became still.

  The jerky movements stopped and it paused for a moment. Then slowly, it turned around to face Bull.

  The man’s face was ghostly pale. His sunken eyes seemed to disappear into the depths of his skull and his hair, covered with filth and grease, was matted to his grime-covered forehead. He saw Bull standing just beyond the bars, peering down at him.

  With lightning speed, he lunged, his eyes blazing wildly and his hands thrusting through the gaps in the bars and out towards the burly soldier in front of him, his fingers snapping shut on thin air as his prey avoided his grasp.

  Bull’s reactions were fast. He stepped backward slightly, just enough to keep him beyond the reach of the man’s fingers, his weapon remaining trained on the feral grunting form inside the cage.

  “What the fuck?” Marty exclaimed.

  The imprisoned man turned to look at him. Their eyes locked as Marty tightened his grip on his rifle, judging whether he should put a bullet into the wretched man or not.

  “Please,” the prisoner suddenly pleaded with them, his voice weak and filled with terror and desperation, sounding like he was on the brink of madness.

  “Please, don’t leave me here,” he said hoarsely. “They might come back. You can’t leave me, you can’t.”

  He was shaking uncontrollably and his wild, bloodshot eyes bulged as they darted from one man to the next, giving him the appearance of a wild animal, trapped in a hunter’s snare and desperate to be set free.

  “It’s the doc…I think,” Bull called over to Stan.

  “Doctor Joseph Warren?” Stan asked slowly, speaking to the bedraggled and terrified man as he made his way towards the cage. “Is that your name, Joseph Warren, from the World Health Organisation?”

  The doctor turned to him, recognising his name and seeming to settle slightly, regaining control of his racing mind and clearly jumbled nerves.

  He nodded.

  “Get him out of there, Bull,” Stan ordered.

  Bull pulled his knife from his belt and began cutting at the tightly bound cord that held the cage together. The doctor, still looking terrified, coward in the corner, continuously looking around him with jerky head movements, like a threatened animal.

  Stan reached in and dragged the doctor out, grabbing him by the scruff of his filth-ridden shirt and pulling him upward so that their faces were just inches apart. The man struggled and twisted against Stan’s grip, trying to free himself and run for the woods.

  “Doctor,” Stan said in a growling voice as the man squirmed and whimpered in his grasp. “Doctor, I need to know what happened here. The soldiers that were with you, where are they, do you know where they are?”

  Doctor Warren, still shaking and with a wild expression on his face, nodded again and turned his head in the direction of the far side of the enclosure. Stan followed his gaze and watched as Bobby and Taff began to head to the area where the doctor had indicated.

  Discarded in the mud like an unwanted heap of rotted meat, they discovered the bound and headless body of the last remaining British soldier. It looked as though he had been beaten and tortured, tied to a tree and subjected to an untold amount of suffering.

  “Cunts…,” Bobby spat as he turned to Stan and shook his head.

  Without needing to be told, Taff began carefully wrapping the soldier’s remains in a canvas sheet, ready to be carried out with them and taken home for burial. They looked around their immediate surroundings, searching for the head of the unfortunate man, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  Stan sat the doctor down.

  “It’s alright, Doc. We’ve got you now and we’re taking you home,” he said, trying hard to reassure him and bring his mind back to reality from the terrifying and chaotic place that it seemed to be lost in.

  “Nick,” Stan called. “Get on to Gerry and tell him we’ve found the doctor. We need the heli to come in for immediate extraction.”

  He looked up at the darkening sky and then at the trees around the perimeter, judging the amount of light that they had remaining and the size of the open area and whether it could be suitable as a Landing Zone.

  “This location will do as the pick-up-point, Nick. Tell the pilot that we’ll bring him in on infrared.”

  “Roger that,” Nick repli
ed.

  “What happened here, Doc?” Stan asked again while Nick worked on getting their communications up and running with the satellite phone.

  The doctor stared back at him blankly.

  Stan decided to try from another angle, pulling a bottle from one of his pouches, and offering it to the traumatised bundle of rags in front of him. The doctor snatched it from his hand and noisily gulped at the refreshing fluid.

  For the next ten minutes, Stan allowed the doctor some time to recover as he continued to drink and eat, as though he had not had sustenance in a long time. He sat there, growling and slurping, as he stuffed chocolate into his mouth and poured water down his throat.

  “What do you think happened?” Nick asked, staring down at the wild man.

  Stan shrugged.

  “I haven’t a clue. I can’t get any sense out of him at the minute. How we doing on comms and the pick-up?”

  “HQ is informed and the heli will pick us up here. They should be inbound in about ten minutes or so.”

  Stan nodded, and then stepped forward towards the doctor again. He squatted down into the mud in front of the deranged man, and stared into his unblinking vacant eyes.

  “What happened here?” This time, Stan’s voice held a hint of menace, his patience wearing thin as he and his men tried to make sense of what had occurred at the rebel camp.

  Finally, the doctor wiped his mouth with the back of his grimy hand, his eyes remaining fixed on the harsh face of his rescuer. Stan’s dark brown eyes, almost black like a shark’s, burned into him.

  “They were dead,” the doctor replied in a hushed voice, glancing to his left and right, seemingly worried that someone may overhear what he had to say.

  “The rebels?” Stan replied. “You mean the rebels are all dead, or do you mean the soldiers that were with you?”

  Doctor Warren shook his head.

  “I mean everyone. They…were…all…dead,” he repeated slowly, emphasising his words and leaning in towards Stan as he spoke them. “They came and killed everyone. No one could stop them. They just kept coming.”

  Before Stan could question him further, alarmed voices to his right grabbed his attention. Danny and Brian both had their weapons up, pointing them at the treeline and taking up fire positions behind nearby overturned crates and boxes.

  “Stand-to,” they called over their shoulders, warning the rest of their teammates of possible approaching enemy. “We’ve got movement to the right, in the trees.”

  Everyone reacted immediately, turning to face the potential threat and checking their fields of fire. They all pushed out to the left and right, creating a baseline where they could send up a wall of fire from. Stan remained in the centre, the doctor close by and back to being a quivering wreck, jabbering on in a hushed panic-stricken voice as he rocked back and forth, staring at the ground.

  “They’re coming, they’re coming back,” he whispered repeatedly.

  “What have we got, Brian?” Stan urgently called through his radio, looking over towards the right flank.

  Brian was about to reply when, a long hollow wail echoed through the trees towards them, quickly joined by more haunting voices that moaned from deep within the shadows of the jungle canopy.

  The men squinted into the gloom, trying to penetrate the dark shadows cast by the foliage to see what was happening.

  “They’re coming,” the doctor whimpered again, dropping to the floor and curling himself into a ball as he trembled uncontrollably.

  The noise grew louder as more woeful voices rang out from the darkness. It sounded like there were hundreds of them, closing in on the rebel camp and howling like demons. The men glanced at one another, their eyes flashing with uncertainty as the din reached fever pitch and the voices were joined by the sounds of snapping branches and heavy footfalls, getting louder and headed towards them. Growls, shrieks and screeches came to them through the trees, rising in volume and number, as whatever it was that was approaching, closed the distance, fast.

  The team was tensed, feeling the imminent fight advancing upon them. They tightened their grips on their weapons and focussed their eyes and ears on the rainforest that surrounded them on all sides.

  “You see anything?” Bobby called from the far left.

  “Nothing,” Danny replied from the right of the line.

  The jungle continued to echo with the eerie resonance and the thumping of running feet.

  “Here they come,” Bull shouted, squirming behind his machinegun as he adjusted and reinforced his fire position, his eyes locked on the treeline. “Stand-by, stand-by.”

  Stan, taking his eyes away from the wall of green in front of them for a moment, turned to the almost incapacitated doctor at his feet.

  “Who,” he growled over the rising wails, “who the fuck is coming?”

  Doctor Warren, his eyes growing impossibly wide and filled with fright as he looked up at Stan and then at the jungle, raised his pallid hand and his grimy finger pointed towards the trees to their left.

  “Them…”

  Stan turned to look in the direction that the doctor pointed and saw a dark figure emerge from the gloomy shadow of the forest canopy. It burst forth, ignoring the branches that whipped at its face and arms. It broke into a sprint, crashing through the foliage and over the tangles of barbed wire, its hands reaching out ahead of it as it caught sight of the men.

  A groan of anticipation, rising into a howl, erupted from the figure’s throat, rasping and gurgling.

  Bobby turned, bringing his rifle around and aiming it at the approaching man. Without a word, he fired a round into the centre of mass as the rampaging individual closed in on him. The bullet punched through his chest, smashing ribs and tearing flesh and organs alike before exiting through the back in a cloud of blood and splintered bone.

  The man did not fall.

  As the echo of the first gunshot continued to ring out around the camp, Bobby fired again and again, hitting the advancing figure with numerous shots and reducing his chest to a bloody pulp.

  Bobby felt panic rising inside him as he watched his rounds hit, but have no effect on the advancing wild man who had closed the gap quickly, still howling and showing no sign of slowing.

  He fired again, feeling the weapon jerk in his hands and the recoil push against his shoulder. Again, he squeezed the trigger, the round exploding in a bright fountain from the muzzle of his rifle. Again, the bullet hit its mark, ripping another hole through the torso of the approaching person who continued to snarl, snapping his teeth, as he drew near.

  With just a few metres to go, the man threw his head up, his gaping maw stretching to the point where all of his teeth could be seen in his black cavernous mouth, a moan of excited expectancy emitting from his ruined and perforated lungs.

  Bobby squeezed the trigger again.

  The bullet erupted from his M4 and smashed a hole through the man’s skull. His body buckled and lost its momentum and veered to the right before dropping to the ground with a heavy thud. The dead man skidded through the mud, the devastated head coming to rest just inches away from Bobby’s boot.

  “Fuck,” Brian exclaimed as he saw more of the screaming and flailing people emerge from the trees.

  “Contact front,” he bellowed.

  As one, all their guns fired in a deafening roar.

  Speeding projectiles of copper and lead, snapped through the air, piercing bodies and trees alike. Everybody opened up with their machineguns and rifles, cutting down the numerous figures that burst forth, indifferent to the deadly wall of fire that they run in to and the countless hits they received.

  Limbs were ripped away, abdomens split open and heads exploded, but still, the fanatical attackers surged onward, smashing their way through the trees and charging towards the men as they continued to cut them down in their droves.

  Dozens of them had fallen as the jungle rang with the crescendo of gunfire. They tumbled through the mud, their arms whirling and paying no interest to th
e wounds they had sustained. Many, having been shot, fought to regain their footing and continue the assault, dragging themselves through the mire and snarling at the men in front of them.

  The inferno continued.

  “Magazine,” someone screamed out.

  “Contact left,” another hollered.

  The bodies continued to drop, but more of them emerged from the trees, taking up the places of their fallen comrades. Despite their casualties and the futility of their attack, Stan soon realised that the crazed people were not going to yield.

  Khat, they must be high on Khat, he thought to himself.

  He squeezed his trigger and saw another person, an incensed child, collapse in front of him, the round smashing through her delicate head and creating a gaping hole at the back of her skull.

  “We can’t hold them,” Brian cried out from the right flank as he and Danny began to step backwards, still firing their rifles into the advancing crowd.

  Stan glanced to his left and saw Bobby and Taff doing the same, slowly retreating under the pressure as more of their attackers launched themselves at the line. They were being overwhelmed, by unarmed madmen, he thought.

  His mind raced and struggled to understand what was happening. He had never seen anything like it in his life, but here they were, pouring a devastating amount of fire into a mob of defenceless and enraged civilians, and unable to halt their advance.

  In the centre, the progress of the assault was held, but their flanks were collapsing.

  He glanced down to his right.

  “Bull, switch left. Nick, switch right,” he ordered, slapping them on their backs to grab their attention over the din of battle.

  The two men complied, twisting in their positions and firing their machineguns across the front of their respective flanks, creating a wall of enfilading fire and giving their own men the time they needed to take up new positions.

  Their perimeter was shrinking.

  “Grenade,” a voice warned from the left.

  A second later, a deafening thud rang out from in front of Bobby’s position as the High Explosives detonated, sending out a wave of pressure and flinging twisted bodies in all directions, mixed with mud, debris and shrapnel.