There was a loud crack that each man on Anderson’s team recognised as Spider’s M24. "Not now Cap.”
"Get a repair team on that breach Bull," instructed Anderson. "Tom you get the men......." Tom never got to hear the rest of the orders as a muffled boom filtered to each man.
"Got a second breach Cap," came Spider’s voice immediately. “Two kilometre east of your position, looks like sector 30.”
"Every spare man get mobile," snapped Anderson, running to one of the six modified Land Rover Discoveries parked side by side. “Spider get your ass over there."
"My ass is already moving Cap," assured Spider.
#
Two streets away, within the outer-lands outside the Forts containment area, stood a twenty five storey building that at one time had been the HQ for a leading insurance company. If a man were to get himself to the twenty fifth floor he would have a panoramic view across the city and more importantly clear vision down into sector 42 of Fort London where the first breach had taken place moments earlier. Right now, a man was enjoying that view and what had taken place, it made him happy for it achieved two things, firstly it created more chaos for his arch enemy Craig Anderson and secondly, it told him something, something that would be useful in the near future. Karl Bruger stood alone at the vast plate glass window, savouring for himself the unfolding scene below. At the entrance to the building were a dozen of the Fort Warwick leader’s best troops ensuring his safety as he studied the fruits of his latest attack.
"So," whispered Bruger to himself. “Your army of soldiers is shrinking Anderson.” Bruger had deliberately planned for the second breach to be opened at a point that was a reasonable distance away from the first and at a point that was much nearer to the HQ used by Anderson’s troops. Bruger reasoned that if Anderson had any troops to spare he would have them deployed from the HQ near the Barbican, the fact that he raced with most of his men from the first breach told him that these men were Anderson’s main, and possibly only, troops. There would be many others who could lift a gun but it was knowledge of the seasoned troops Fort London had at its disposal that Bruger was interested in. Bruger’s men involved in the second attack would withdraw in five minutes time as per Bruger’s orders, their sole purpose being to expose Fort London’s strength in troops. "Thin on the ground Anderson,” the Fort Warwick leader hissed. "Now I have the answer I needed. Now I will come and take the child," he screamed, jabbing a finger down towards the mayhem below. “I need and will have the blood that runs through her veins and once I have her I will destroy Fort London and you within it.” Bruger’s head scientist, Jeremy Boardman, was committed to finding an alternative to the child’s blood, a chemical answer to stabilising the cocktail he had developed to control the Tainted but Bruger’s confidence in the man, despite his promises, was evaporating as each day the scientist’s eyes became wilder, his skin clammier as the White Lightning, that he himself had developed and was constantly sniffing, destroyed his body. Turning from the window, Bruger, a giant of a man, stomped back to the head of the stairway that would lead down to the street, and began his descent. The day of reckoning was coming and he was a man happy in the blind certainty that the day he had waited so long for was near. "Vengeance will be mine," snarled the deranged leader as he left the building. "Mine.”
Chapter 2
"The Butcher"
Blade, Bruger’s chief enforcer, was not a happy man. He would rather have been at the latest attack on Fort London but instead he was once again making a delivery to a point north of Fort Warwick. His leader, having moved his Mutant project to a secret location just a few miles away from their stronghold, concealed his activities there by wrapping it in complete secrecy. A small army of his most trusted men had secured the installation he had named The Keep within a ring of steel. It was an installation where no radios or communication devices of any kind was allowed, an installation where the only people to come and go were Bruger and his most trusted soldier, Blade.
Everything required to maintain the facility was transported by Blade on his weekly run from Fort Warwick inside a Pinzer, short for the Pinzgauer 716M, a workhorse of a heavy duty truck. It could carry 10 men with room to spare, its VW 5-cylinder 2.4L turbo diesel with intercooler could bowl it along at 122 kilometres per hour and cover 800 kilometres without refuelling with a payload of just over 1,400 kilograms. In short, a useful piece of kit. Even more so as Blade had modified the one he used by mounting, on the bonnet in front of the passenger seat, a Gatling style AIE-486H Heavy Machine Gun that took only a second to “spin up” before reaching its highest rate of fire. Pulling the trigger once caused the gun to fire a maximum of two rounds at a moderate rate; holding it down built up the rate of fire to a higher speed. Unlike most Heavy Machine Guns, the AIE-486H did not overheat with continuous fire. The three barrels on the gun dispersed the heat equally within each barrel, allowing the gun to remain cool and continue functioning. Blade preferred to use armour piercing tungsten penetrator shells to create maximum damage, it’s how his mind operated, always go for the maximum in all things.
For months now, the enforcer was forced to take on the role of transporter, using his beloved vehicle to transport food for the staff within the secret compound and general supplies fulfilling their every need. Supplying food for the Mutants filled another part of Blade’s duties and it was this area of his brief that troubled him the most. Jeremy Boardman, Bruger’s pet scientist, had tried and failed to get the Mutants to feed on Tainted flesh, for there was a great abundance of this simply roaming the outer-lands, but they had showed no interest in feeding unless the human flesh was Pure, Pure and fresh and it was this that created repulsion for the hardened enforcer. Even though his soul had been tempered within the history of Bruger’s journey as a drugs baron during the bloody years previous to the coming of the plague, he was not able to come to terms with what took place in "The Cutting Shed", the place where he delivered humans into the hands of a man known only as "The Butcher”. This was a fairly accurate description of the man who prior to the plague was just that, a butcher. He would always be the first to tell of his skills with a set of razor sharp Wusthof boning knives ranging from a six inch model up to a sixteen inch bad boy. However what "The Butcher" would not tell you, at least not freely, is that in the two year period between the closing of his business and the start of the plague, he was an inmate in a secure institution for the criminally insane. His place there was a mistake he had complained to the High Court judge, the women found in the freezers at his small abattoir in several small plastic bags had got what they deserved he had argued. Each had been a prostitute and needed, according to “The Butcher”, to be removed from the streets. The six men in similar bags had been gay so of course he felt it was his duty to take them away from society. The two small children had kicked a ball into his garden so needed to be given a lesson in respect, whilst the two black men had merely looked at him in a strange way that he found offensive so, of course, had to be punished.
In truth, in the mind of "The Butcher" there was very little reason required for him to unwrap his knives and put them to work. Into his hands Blade had delivered countless cargoes of the walking food he was instructed to gather by Bruger. He had only entered "The Cutting Shed" once, he swore he would never enter it again for within he had witnessed true horror, horror that put into the shade anything he had done in his entire life and he would be the first to admit that he had done some terrible things. During his chequered career, Blade had seen and inflicted pain and death on many men but what he had seen in that one visit to "The Butcher’s" domain would stay with him and give him nightmares every time he closed his eyes. The deranged man who never left "The Cutting Shed" had managed to make Blade feel something he had never felt before, something completely alien to him, something he had never before had to deal with. That thing was fear, blind, cold fear.
#
Jeremy Boardman’s ears pricked up as he heard the familiar sound of Blade’s Pinzer
rumble into "The Keep”. He was busy preparing the last of the Mutants in a large warehouse of a structure in a secured corner of the secret compound he had turned into a fairly sophisticated Lab. All of the blood that had been gathered from the child, Hope, whilst she had been Bruger’s captive, had been used to create enough of the cocktail Boardman had developed to ensnare and control selected Tainted creatures, placing them under Bruger’s absolute control. Each of the selected were large specimens, each was well muscled, the majority were men, but Blade had trapped six females on his gathering forays who fitted the criteria Bruger had laid down. Boardman’s procedure ensured that each of the Mutants reacted only to the ex-drug baron’s voice, giving him an army that was 220 strong, an army that would walk barefoot through fire if he so desired, without a beat of hesitation. Now though Boardman, despite his success to date, was under pressure to find a way to expand Bruger’s soulless soldiers by finding a way to bypass the need for the child’s blood, for his leader was frustrated, frustrated by the fact that the child might never again fall under his control, frustrated that his plans to become a new age Ghengis Khan and control vast areas of the planet could be blocked by one small child. He had made his demands clear to his chief scientist, "Find me a solution to this problem or your use to me comes to an end, as will your life.”
As pitiful as it was, Boardman liked his life and intended to hold onto it as long as possible and so he snorted huge quantities of White Lightning to keep him awake so he could keep searching for that breakthrough, for he was close, so very close, he just needed a little more time. But he knew that time was in short supply, like Bruger’s patience, it was running out. To add to his woes, one of the Mutants had escaped from The Keep. Number 221 as the tattoo on the back of his neck indicated, had somehow slipped out of the secure compound. Boardman had kept the fact to himself fearing the wrath of his leader at losing one of his valued army, no matter what explanation he might have offered he knew Bruger would have taken it badly. For a time he had wondered if he was to blame, for with Mutant 221, he had altered the cocktail he had injected into him, in a moment of madness he had prepared a draft that contained ten times the normal blood content taken from the child and double the White Lightning. It was the last drops of the child’s blood and it was a shot in the dark as his scientific brain wondered what the outcome might be with the extra dosage. He knew Bruger would be furious at the waste so covered his tracks and altered his records, wiping the episode out of his mind, easily persuading himself that the escape had been a simple error on his part in securing the holding cell of Mutant 221. His assumption was a gross error, an error that would have far reaching consequences beyond his wildest dreams.
#
Three thousand, six hundred and sixty six miles away from the wasted lands of Great Britain, another secure centre for the Pure had been established. It contained a little over twenty million souls and was by far the largest community of dozens who had managed to escape the plague on this continent. There were other compounds dotted throughout the land but their combined numbers represented only around eight percent of the population that had thrived prior to the plague. The United States of America had boasted a population of a little under three hundred and thirty million prior to the curse of the living dead that swept through the land like a runaway tsunami, now only around forty nine million in total, remained Pure. They spent each and every day living with the ever constant threat from the Tainted, there was an ever present tightness in each stomach at the thought of ending up roaming the land, brain cells corrupted by the plague, wiping all knowledge, all memories and leaving nothing, absolutely nothing but a walking husk, an eating machine that craved nothing but Pure human flesh.
Other continents had fared no better. In South America a populace of four hundred and fifteen million had been decimated to less than four million Pure, in Antarctica the transient population, made up of scientists and researchers, was completely lost to the Tainted. Africa, with over a billion souls had been savaged by the curse leaving less than twenty million spread amongst a rag tag of secure bases dotted around the vast continent. Europe, Asia and Australia had previously contained over 5.2 billion people, now could only number less than two hundred million free from the virus. The world’s population of over 7.3 billion had been split into two camps, those with free will, less than three hundred million, and those with no will, apart from eating the Pure, around seven billion. The only hope for the survival of mankind was a meeting of minds, a sharing of knowledge and research. Failure to do so would mark the end of the Human Race. The crossroads of opportunity was fast approaching, left or right, annihilation or survival? The outcome would be close, too close to call.
Chapter 3
"They Had Simply Vanished"
"Long time no see Preacher," grinned Hog, slamming the high security gate closed as "The Preacher" swept through.
"Out of sight maybe Hog but you have still been in my prayers," responded "The Preacher", stepping from the Cherokee Jeep that was his latest mode of transport.
"Yeah well if you’re aiming to save my soul Preacher you had best double your efforts," grinned the massive Hell’s Angel, wrapping "The Preacher" in a swamping bear hug.
"Join us at our meeting today my friend and we will do what we can," responded the black man, struggling to free himself from Hog’s powerful arms.
"More chance of me turning gay," laughed the Angel leader, stepping back and freeing his visitor.
"God looks on all equally Hog," wheezed "The Preacher", rubbing his ribs. "So even if you were gay there would be a place for you in his house.”
"Well take it from me Preacher," came a voice from behind them, "he ain't gay.”
The two men turned to see Saphire, Hog’s partner, striding towards them, a mischievous expression taking control of features that were worn rugged by years of riding pillion on Hog’s Harley.
"Now watch what you’re saying," warned Hog, looking slightly flustered.
"You mean like you’re as fruity as a fruit frog?" she winked.
"The Preacher" roared with laughter as Hog turned crimson and moved from foot to foot, his lips moving soundlessly. “Fruit frog? I'm not sure of God’s view on those, Hog," ribbed the giant black man.
"I....I've got work to do," blustered the Angel leader, stomping away towards the sheds where the Angel’s bikes were stored. He and Bryan would spend hours there working on their beloved machines. Bryan had become very much a father figure to the Angels and a grandfather to children of the chapter. He had been rescued by Anderson and his team from sure death when the FL security man came across him trapped in a car by a mass of WDs, only now he was unrecognisable from the elderly man who was comfortable in brown corduroys, a check shirt and a sensible woolly cardigan. Time spent around Hog and the Angels had changed that, he could now be found in faded jeans, a Levi jacket with no sleeves and a red bandana tied around his head. The other project they sweated over was the AH-64 Apache Longbow attack helicopter Hog had come across when scavenging through an American air base. Saphire had forbidden him to bring it home, it was the only encouragement he needed, he and Bryan loaded it onto a low loader and dragged it home. Trouble was, despite their extensive knowledge, they could not get it to fire up which was frustrating as it was fully loaded with armaments including a 30 mm M230 Chain Gun, one Hydra 70 mm and two CRV7 70 mm air-to-ground rockets and last but not least a single AIM-92 Stinger missile, all of which could have been put to good use a number of times over the last few months.
“You hop to it my love," shouted Saphire after him as he shut the door of the work shed behind him.
The Angel leader broke stride for just a beat but never turned before striding quickly away to the bike sheds. In truth he was glad that he would be away from the pair when Saphire spoke to "The Preacher" of the sad news they both carried. They had agreed between them that she would be the one to pass it on for she was now one of his flock within the compound. She and six others would sit and talk
with the inspiring man who, despite the ravages of the plague that had devastated the planet, visited them three or four times a year and spoke of God’s love and purpose. A message that did not seed easily whilst the stony ground of the plague ravished the lands.
"He does not look a happy man," winced "The Preacher", watching the Levi clad leader depart.
"He'll get over it," assured Saphire, taking the towering man by the arm and leading him through a door in the side of a large warehouse. It took them into a cavernous space used as a general social area by the 25 men, 23 women and 9 children who made up the Zombie Chapter. Following the battle with Bruger, the numbers had diminished considerably but new members had arrived in dribs and drabs to replenish the group to its present strength.
The Preacher sensed Saphire's unease as they sat at an enormous wooden table that had seen countless noisy meal times amongst the Angels. Today however it served just the two of them.
“You look like someone with a burden to unload my sister," encouraged "The Preacher" in a deep sonorous voice.
Saphire hesitated, reluctant to be the one to share the news she had only heard herself the previous day. A lone rider had arrived at their compound shortly after dawn the day before, it was not unusual for stray Hells Angels to find their way to their compound to join their group. Even in these troubled times types gathered to types. He had informed Hog and Saphire on his arrival that his name was Hatchet which if he had been joining the local tennis club might raise a few eyebrows. Here however at the home ground of the Zombie Chapter where the leader, Hog, was supported at their compound by kindred spirits with names such as Shotgun Sammy, Bone Crusher and Blade Runner, the new arrival’s tag created no waves. Hatchet Man had informed them that he had tagged onto a group of Pure at a small settlement ten miles north east of Fort Warwick, a group who, although the complete opposite of himself, took him in and gave him food and shelter. Both Hog and Saphire knew the group and it was that fact and the tale that Hatchet Man had to tell that caused their sadness. Now it was her turn to tell that tale.
Bravo Two Zombie (Book 3): The Final Solution Page 2