Fear the Reaper

by Richard Murray

  Fear the Reaper

  Killing the Dead: Season Two Book Six

  By Richard Murray

  Copyright 2017 Richard Murray

  All Rights Reserved

  All Characters are a work of Fiction.

  Any resemblance to real persons

  Living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Some scenes are based on real locations that

  have been altered for the purposes of the story.

  Chapter 1

  My fingers tightened around the hilt of the poignard as we entered the mouth of the River Clyde. The Frigid wind flung icy rain at us as though determined to do everything it could to push us back out to sea. Away from that desolate, city of the dead.

  Jinx, nudged her head against my side and I ran one hand over her damp fur. She was miserable on the small inflatable craft and couldn’t wait to be back on dry land. Even if that would mean facing a horde of the undead.

  The land rose to either side of us and there was little movement to be seen. That was to be expected since we still had a long way to go before we reached the heart of the city of Glasgow. The river stretched for ten kilometres or more before then and we were only planning to go half that distance.

  “Bridge ahead,” Gregg said loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engines.

  My one concern had been that noise. It would attract everything to us and while the river was more than a hundred metres wide for the majority of its length, we would still need to land somewhere and doing so without having to fight our way ashore would be a bonus.

  “I see it.”

  The Erskine Bridge. A multi-span cable-stayed box girder bridge, whatever the hell that meant. One of the Naval engineers had explained it in entirely more detail than I’d had time for. All I knew was that it stretched across the river and our small invasion force would have to pass beneath it. I’d played that game before and I knew what it could mean.

  “Be alert,” I said in my most authoritative tone I could muster.

  A chorus of ‘aye’s’ came from the other five people on my boat and I hoped similar orders were issued by the squad leaders in the other boats. I turned, craning my neck to see and was pleased to note that each and every one of the twenty-two small craft was full of attentive people.

  My grip tightened as we passed beneath that great bridge. It soared over our heads, forty-five feet above the waters and even from the river I could see the abandoned cars that filled its length.

  There was little movement though and I breathed a small sigh of relief as we passed unhindered. No moans of the undead as they saw us, no falling bodies splashing into the water all around us. No deaths amongst my people. Not yet anyway.

  “Figure I’ll need a new pair of pants if we have to go under many more of those bloody things,” Gregg said and I fought down the smile that tugged at my lips.

  Unlike so many of the others, he still treated me like Lily. A fact that I was immensely grateful for since so many others couldn’t see past that night at the refugee camp. When I’d led so many people to their deaths and saved much more, I had achieved more than a little notoriety.

  More buildings began to dot the land to either side of the river and I pointed at a screen of trees and the rows of warehouses that rose above them.

  “Make a note to check those out once we’ve established a landing zone,” I said to Gregg.

  “Will do, boss lady.”

  I caught the beginnings of a frown on the face of Mark, one of the two soldiers assigned to my squad. He, more than most, seemed to dislike anyone showing me anything less than the absolute respect he expected.

  That could be a problem further down the line and if we survived the morning, then it was something I’d need to address. Not that I thought it would be any real trouble, just something that needed dealing with.

  Gregg could take care of himself of course and the other soldier, the taciturn Lars had no interest in much beyond killing every zombie he could get his hands on. Suraya, our trainee combat medic was a meek little woman, barely more than nineteen. I’d been surprised that she’d volunteered but had welcomed another woman to the team.

  Ray, the big man who piloted our boat grinned at me as I looked back at him and saw him once again clutching the ring he kept on a chain around his neck. His wife would kill me if anything happened to him and while I’d fought to get him assigned to my team, I swore to her that I’d keep him safe.

  Six to a boat and twenty-two boats. That gave us one hundred and thirty-two people in the assault force and that was entirely far too large a part of our overall forces for me to be comfortable with. Too few to take on a city that had housed a half a million people.

  Our orders though were clear. Establish a beachhead and locate any survivors. Several larger craft would follow us with medical aid and food taken from our limited stocks. They would take back any people we found and transport them to the ships holding position out at sea, which would then take them to the Isle of Lewis and our new home.

  It had taken a lot longer than I’d expected but we’d finally managed to get everyone out to the island and settled in. I still marvelled at just how many people were there. More than twenty thousand had survived the attack and been transported to an island that had originally been home to fifteen thousand.

  We were running short on food and medical supplies. With Autumn here and winter fast approaching, we’d need the food stored in the city’s warehouses to survive.

  “Zombies, boss.”

  “I see them,” I said and winced a little as I looked back at Gregg.

  He didn’t seem to have noticed and I knew that I was being more than a little over-sensitive, but I hated bringing attention back to it. Especially since he’d taken it so badly back when the doctors first told him.

  The skin of his face where the Feral had clawed him had healed, though poorly. Jagged ridges of skin sat where once clear, smooth skin had been. While not especially vain, he’d not been able to look in a mirror for quite some time. More so when he left off the rough leather patch that had been given to him to cover the space where his left eye had been.

  “What is that place?” he asked, raising a hand to cover his remaining eye from the rain as he peered ahead.

  A complex of buildings made of red brick sat beside the water with ample grounds around them that swarmed with the undead. I shook my head slowly.

  “The hospital most likely.”

  “Fuck!” he said softly as he estimated the number of undead and came to the same conclusion I had. Too damned many.

  “That’s okay,” I said, loud enough for the whole squad to hear. “We knew the hospitals would be overrun. They’d also have used a hell of a lot of their supplies when the outbreak first began. Going there was always a fallback option.”

  “Too right, lass,” Ray called from where he sat at the rear of the craft.

  Despite his cheerful assurance, it wasn’t a great start. We’d known that the undead would be high in number, but for the first of our potential targets to be so seriously swarmed with the undead even after the long hot summer we’d had, was more than a little disheartening.

  “What’s that place?” Gregg asked.

  I followed his gaze to a multi-storied building of white stone that filled a huge area of land to our right. Once again, I held back my dismay as I saw the undead gathered along the shore, moving towards the river as they heard our approach. Not as many as at the hospital, but still, too many.

  “Shopping centre, I think.”

  “Damn.”

  Twenty thousand people needed a lot of things to keep them going through the winter. Alongside food, were the clothes. Not to mention the babies that were being born. They would need all manner of cloth
es and things like prams and bassinets.

  I’d hoped that getting some of those items would have been as simple as walking into a shopping centre and looting the storerooms. After all, when the world had fallen apart, who the hell would have gone to a shopping centre on the edge of the city?

  Apparently several hundred people.

  “Okay, two down but the next target should be fine,” I said with a little more confidence than I felt.

  I kept my fingers and toes crossed as the buildings on either side of the river became larger as manufactories took over. I breathed a sigh of relief as we came to our tertiary target and saw little in the way of zombies.

  “Shipyards are intact,” Mark said into the radio he carried. I tuned him out as he reported back to the fleet and instead focussed on the buildings.

  A vast area on the south side of the river to our right was taken up by BAE Systems. A company that made a billion pounds of profit a year by producing all manner of things for the ministry of defence. Aircraft, armoured vehicles, electronics and most importantly for the fleet, ships.

  They had the manufactories to repair the damage done to the fleet along with general wear and tear on systems that were due to be overhauled just before the apocalypse began. Their warehouses would hold a great many materials that the naval engineers could use to help secure our home.

  “Ma’am?”

  I looked back to Mark and cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “Orders received. Lieutenant Jacobs will make landfall and set up a secure area. Once LZ is secure, the transports will move in.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Ah, we have been ordered to maintain our heading.”

  “Why?”

  “Reconnaissance drones have spotted something they want us to check out.”

  “Where?”

  I didn’t like the sound of that and while I knew that Charlie and the other drone controllers wouldn’t send us into anything too dangerous, they couldn’t always see everything on the ground.

  “Just around the bend up ahead, ma’am. Some buildings on the north bank.”

  “Okay then,” I said as the rest of the small craft began to peel away to the south. “Press on ahead Ray.”

  “Aye, lass.”

  As much as I hated a change to the plan, I was happy enough not to have to enter the warren of buildings around the shipyards and root out any undead that might be there. Besides, if they had spotted something that could mean survivors.

  Not that I expected to find many of them in the city. After all, it had been almost a year since everything went to hell and to have survived that long while surrounded by a half million or so zombies would take some incredible luck.

  “Up ahead,” Gregg said.

  Three buildings stood in a row alongside the river. Fifteen storeys high with about twenty-five metres between each of them, they would have been office blocks before the end of the world. In the open space between them, the undead milled about.

  “Shamblers,” I said softly. “Maybe a hundred or so.”

  “Moving slowly,” Gregg agreed. “Probably not had much in the way of food for a long time.”

  “Still more than the six of us can handle,” I said and added, “seven of us,” as Jinx nudged me.

  “Movement on the roof,” Lars said in that deep growling tone of his.

  I peered up, shading my eyes against the rain and let out a delighted gasp. There were definitely people up there and they weren’t undead judging by the way they waved down at us.

  “Holy hells,” Gregg said. “How the heck did they survive this long?”

  “Better question is how do we get them down…” I began but broke off as a cage was swung out over the side of the nearest building and began to slowly descend. “Well bugger me! They have an elevator.”

  “Boats too,” Suraya said as she pointed ahead to where a couple of small craft had been tied up at the base of the building.

  “They look friendly enough,” I said with a quick glance at each of the others. “Think we should go up?”

  “I say go for it,” Gregg said.

  “You lot go, I’ll watch yer boat,” Ray added.

  “The cage looks big enough for a few of us,” I said and made a decision. “Okay, Ray stays here and the rest of us go up.”

  “Me too?” Suraya asked in a voice that quavered a little.

  I understood her nerves. She’d been part of the mass exodus when the world fell and had seen her share of horrors at the hands of other survivors. One of the reasons she’d begun training as a medic was to help those such hurt.

  “We’ll be fine and they might have people who need help.”

  There was little else to say as the cage arrived. It was made of aluminium bars forming a rough rectangle with wooden boards secured to the base for us to stand on. The cables that held it seemed thick enough that it would hold us all but I still swallowed nervously and gripped the railing tight as it began to rise.

  “Shit!” Gregg said as a hand slapped against a window as we rode past it.

  The undead were inside the building for the first three floors at least. After that, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see any more of them. By the time we hit the tenth floor, faces peered back out at us.

  People. Real, living people. Men, women and children, many of them waving at us as we passed. I tried to get a count of the numbers but soon gave up. Six floors of people though, that could be a heck of a lot more than I’d expected.

  I brushed down the front of the naval fatigues I wore. It seemed like I was about to meet a group of survivors as a representative of the fleet which meant that I needed to appear like anything other than a ragged survivor.

  Mark and Lars were, of course, the very picture of professionalism. They stood at parade rest, their weapons sheathed on their belts as they waited with the kind of patience they must teach to all new cadets.

  Suraya had at least taken the time to tie her hair up in a ponytail and clutched her medical bag to her chest. Gregg leant against the railing and stared out over the river, steadfastly refusing to face the people watching us pass.

  The cage shuddered to a stop and a group of people approached us, each starting to talk at the same time. It was a confusing babble of voices and words that were only silenced when a single voice rose above all the rest.

  “Silence! Shut your damned mouths and get back out of the way.”

  A tall man pushed his way through the crowd, shooing them back as one would a bunch of unruly hens. He ensured space was cleared beside the edge of the building to allow us to disembark and turned to us.

  As soon as he saw our uniforms, he snapped to attention and performed a crisp salute, right arm held straight out to the side, bending at the elbow so that the tips of his fingers were just barely touching his temple, the hand turned out so that the palm was facing us.

  Mark and Lars returned the salute, in much the same manner while the rest of us performed one arguably less neatly. To be fair, we were the civilian arm of the navy and saluting hadn’t been a big part of the limited training we’d had over the last three months.

  “Lieutenant Macintosh, Third East Anglican Regiment.”

  “Lily Morgan, Royal Naval Civilians.”

  Lines formed on his brow and the corner of his mouth twitched as he returned my gaze. His face bore plenty of worry lines and a rough stubble covered his chin, though his greying hair was kept short and neat.

  “That’s a new one on me, miss.”

  “We’re a new branch,” I said with a grin.

  “Are… Are you all there is?”

  A pregnant silence filled the rooftop as I took a moment to look around at the faces gathered there. Men and women, young and old. Many bore the signs of the stresses they had borne, of the horrors they had witnessed. All of them wore the same expression as they dared to hope.

  I raised my voice as I spoke to them all.

  “On the Isle of Lewis, just off the coast, we ha
ve established a community. Some twenty thousand people are gathered there.”

  A slow murmuring began at that, excited whisperings as that hope began to grow in the faces of those gathered before me.

  “We are just the first wave and we are here to say to you; the Royal Navy is coming for you. You’re safe.”

  I closed my mouth, swallowing the next words I’d been about to say as the cheers drowned out anything I would have said. People hugged, wearing their joy openly as more than one eye shed a tear. I pulled the Lieutenant to one side as my companions were embraced by the crowd.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked him.

  “Three hundred and twenty-seven,” he replied and I just stared at him in utter astonishment.

  “How?”

  “Now that’s a story that will take a while,” he said with a grin. “But…”

  He cut off and cocked his head to one side as though he’d caught the sound of something. His smile, that had just moments before filled his face, fell away as he turned towards the east and hurried over to the edge of the building.

  “SILENCE!” His voice was a roar that quieted all sound around him. The crowd falling silent as though a wave had passed over them.

  With the voices stilled I could hear it too. The clang of a bell from somewhere nearby, I looked at him and opened my mouth to ask him what it meant but he spoke first.

  “They’re coming. Everyone prepare yourselves.”

  “Who’s coming?” I asked as I watched the crowd disperse without question or complaint.

  “The Dead,” he said and a shiver ran down my spine at the expression on his face.

  Chapter 2

  They had built a bridge between the buildings. Made of the same poles as the cage we had been raised up in. It spanned the twenty odd metres to the next building and seemed fairly sturdy and secure though I doubted more than one person could cross at a time.

  The Lieutenant looked at Suraya and then back at me before he said, “you better come with me.”

  “Where?” I asked but he’d already set off.

  As he crossed the bridge to the roof of the next building, several people came out of the stairwell and set off after him. Six women and two men, they carried blankets and bottles of water. I glanced at my squad and gestured for them to follow before setting off after him with Jinx at my heels.