Guns up into shoulders, with the exception of Kimberley and Peter, who held their melee weapons with sweating palms and formed the second rank of their small defence, they held their ground to see if anything presented itself.
Nothing happened. The eerie quiet of the car park told them nothing, as sweating hands gripped weapons tighter in preparation for an impending confrontation with the dead, as feet shuffled nervously to adopt the perfect stance in readiness. A gentle change in the breeze pushed the light wind into their faces and carried with it a hint of sweet, necrotic flesh that they recognised all too well.
“What the hell are we doing?” Peter asked in a hushed whisper from the back of their formation. “Why don’t we just leave?”
The solution to their peril, so simplistic and easy to recognise for someone so young and logical, stunned the trained soldiers for a heartbeat. Their heads had been filled with angles of fire, approach routes of the enemy and their numbers; with the risk of the faster ones being in play, and all manner of other problems that Peter’s mind wasn’t encumbered by through an overload of knowledge.
Johnson spoke first, mimicking the same low whisper that Peter had adopted.
“Everyone inside the wagon,” he hissed. “Nice and slow.”
As they turned to file back inside the safety of so many layers of metal armour, a new noise broke the spell. A loud bang with an accompanying crack, followed quickly by a second with a louder, more worrying sound of smashing glass and the tuneful tinkle of the broken shards hitting the ground below. As one, their eyes roamed slowly upwards to the first-floor window, breath catching in throats as a collective series of gasps fired like a ragged volley.
From that window, only fractionally too small for a fully grown adult to squeeze through, protruded the head and left arm of a Screecher which moaned at them and gnashed white teeth set in receded, black gums.
“Now would be good,” Bufford said as his feet propelled him towards the side of the tank. He dropped his weapon to turn and hoist Peter high up to grasp the top of the hull and begin to pour himself through the open hatch. The sound of the rear doors closing came loudly, but not as loudly as the splintering of wood and more breaking glass as the unseen door holding back the hungry monsters gave way.
Johnson, moving lithely for a big man with all the encouragement of a gruesome death at his back, knelt on top of the Warrior and slipped the short-barrelled shotgun from his shoulder to point it in the direction of the building.
His intention was to provide cover, should any of the bastards break ranks and make for one of his group before they were safely ensconced, but if he was honest with himself, he relished the prospect of firing the gun to relieve some of the pent-up rage he had been bottling up inside himself for far too long.
“We’re in,” Bufford reported. “Let’s go!”
“Hold on,” Johnson said, telling himself that he was in little danger and that he needed to satisfy a curiosity that had just presented itself to him. He wanted to know, after such a brutal winter, which had followed the hot end to the previous summer and the short, sharp shock of a brief autumn season, how the ones preserved inside had degraded. They’d seen well enough how those zombies stuck in the open had turned out. They were generally ragged, emaciated and pale-to-the-point-of translucent skinned. But his curiosity, mixed with a hint of bloodlust, kept him in position atop the armoured vehicle.
Behind him, on the higher section of the hull, he heard the hatch bang shut and lock to indicate Bufford’s escape to safety. His own hatch, to the front and left of the vehicle, was open and inviting for him to step down into, but still he didn’t make a move.
“Come on!” Bufford’s voice yelled from inside, the sound travelling out through the open hatch to him. He turned to look at the hatch again, only spinning back to face the pub at another, far more insistent noise than the shouting of his comrades. A boot-sole crunching stone—one of those sounds that the mind understood deep down far more quickly than the brain could verbally identify —followed by the desperate sucking inwards of breath in what he knew was preparation for the ungodly shriek the things let out.
It never got the chance to finish the call to arms, as Johnson’s blast took it full in the chest to throw it down in broken ruin. He’d loaded the gun with the heaviest of hunting shot, effectively launching a handful of small ball bearings into the body at brutally short range before the pattern of the projectiles had time to spread out. The body hit the ground, landing on its back with a crunch as a second, heavier sound copied it. That sound, Johnson saw with disgust, was the head-first impact of the mindless monster from the upstairs window finally wriggling itself free to plummet the short drop to the car park, where it met an instant end, the inertia of the weight of the body cracking the skull to switch off the lights for good.
More spilled out around the corner of the pub and just as Johnson pumped another cartridge into the chamber on instinct, good sense prevailed as his mind recognised the danger he was putting himself—putting all of them—in, as one of the tightly-packed crowd of overstaying late-night drinkers was leaping over the front ranks with inhuman agility to reach its canned meal first.
Johnson turned, heading for the hatch just as a mechanical whirring sound above his head forced him to duck underneath the swinging barrel of the main gun. Bufford, likely just as eager for some payback as Johnson was, swung the cupola towards the threat just as the SSM threw himself inside and slammed down the hatch.
The deafening, chattering racket of the main coaxial chain gun hammering rounds into the mob blotted out every other sound in the world until the hatch was sealed. That gun, firing at the closest range it could manage with the barrel fully depressed, tore bloody ruin through the pack to turn the previously quiet car park into a butcher’s shop in seconds.
Johnson threw on the headset to hear the tail end of Bufford’s opinion.
“…oody hell are you playing at? Get us out of here!”
Johnson fired up the massive engine, throwing it into gear and taking off fast enough to buck the Warrior’s nose up into the air and force the still-firing gun to tear great chunks of stone out of the building in a sweeping arc as they made their escape.
He didn’t let up until they were half a mile down the road, then he realised he’d gone in the wrong direction and slowed to report his error to the others.
“We’ve gone bloody east,” he reported, annoyance heavy in his words of self-criticism. “I need to turn us around and go back past the pub. Buffs?”
“Oh,” the SBS man chuckled, “I’m ready for another pass. Still not letting me use the artillery?”
Johnson ignored the quip, only giving a low growl in response, not wanting to expend a valuable piece of ordnance by sending a high explosive shell into a pub housing a few Screechers and a now-deceased Lima.
“Give them another pass with the co-axial,” he said. “I’ll stick to the far right of the road to give you space; make sure none of them gets near us.”
“My bloody pleasure,” Bufford responded.
The pub came into his limited field of view in under a minute, and he didn’t slow to allow his gunner the time to enjoy himself, but blasted past at close to their top speed amid a roar of diesel engine revs. The gun began barking and burping its rounds at the strung-out crowd milling about in search of the promised meal that had vanished before their eyes. Johnson steered to the furthest side of the road away from the building to keep his distance, but was still forced to line up two of them to be crushed under his right side tracks.
In a fleeting moment, they were past, and even though the cupola had swung all the way around to continue firing on the move, the gun quickly fell silent.
Johnson took a few deep breaths, settling himself back into a more sedate cruising speed, and let out a sigh. In his earphones, he heard amused chuckling rising into uncontrollable laughter which went on for slightly longer than he wanted to tolerate.
“What’s so bloody funny?”
he snapped at Bufford.
“I… I was just thinking…” Bufford replied in a voice that implied he was wiping tears from his eyes. “That’s probably got to be the longest pub lock-in of all time…”
SEVEN
Professor Grewal, along with Professor Chambers and his small team, set up the lab equipment in readiness for having something to work with. As per their requests, banks of fridges and freezers filled one wall of the former livestock barn under bright lights and their samples of potential vaccine cultures had been painstakingly transferred to the freezers from mobile cold storage, using liquid nitrogen.
Grewal, finding himself at a momentary loss for useful activity, wandered over to where the stainless-steel urn bubbled away keeping the water warm for their drinks. He used a plastic spoon to shovel a decidedly unmeasured amount of instant coffee into a polystyrene cup, before splashing the almost-boiling water in. He looked around for sugar and fresh milk to accompany it, instead finding only an off-brand powdered creamer. He picked it up, inspecting it as he might a particularly virulent strain of bacteria, and decided against contaminating the drink with lumps of the stuff.
“Yo, Doc,” barked a loud voice from behind him, forcing a small yelp from his lips as he jumped and turned around to face one of the men from the US Army department responsible for all matters regarding infectious diseases.
Grewal opened his mouth to explain for the thousandth time that he was a professor, and hadn’t been a mere doctorate holder for well in excess of a decade, when he saw the inane look on the man’s face and decided not to waste his breath.
“Yes?”
“The frogmen are on the horn, saying they’re coming in hot with a couple of new buddies for you.”
Master Chief Petty Officer Ryan Miller was unhappy about his orders. He made representations about those orders, even so far as requesting a meeting with the base commander prior to shipping out, only to arrive at the commander’s office to find the man’s desk chair occupied by a guy in a grey suit that screamed ‘Langley’ directly into his brain.
As soon as he met the man, Fisher, he claimed to be called, although Miller always knew his type to have forgettable fake names, he also knew that arguing was pointless. Orders were orders, and it looked like his orders came directly from the CIA.
He’d changed his approach then, and instead of standing to attention and addressing a senior officer as he had planned to do, he removed his headgear and flopped into a seat without asking for permission. Treating the man like an equal, even if the son of a bitch was technically in charge, set Miller’s stall out plain as day.
“So,’ he mused in a tone of obvious annoyance. “You want us to fly to butt-fuck nowhere, England—”
“Scotland,” Fisher interrupted annoyingly.
“—butt-fuck nowhere, Scotland, and take a boat to the mainland where we’ll be capturing live specimens of infected humans. I got that right?”
“In a nutshell,” Fisher told him, politician’s smile not wavering.
“And your intel package is complete and up to date?” Miller went on.
“Count on it.”
“And how do you propose we go about securing said infected assholes?”
Fisher leaned back in his chair and smiled. It was the smile of a man who knew he had already won, because unless the SEAL wanted to commit mutiny and refuse to carry out his orders, he was stuck with them.
“Master Chief,” he said smoothly. “I’ll leave the finer details of that matter to you entirely. Just get it done.” Miller banged his clenched fist hard on the top of the oak desk, knocking down a framed picture of a square-jawed man in an officer’s uniform shaking hands with a man who looked remarkably like Reagan, and he snarled at the CIA agent.
“Easy for you to say, four thousand miles away in your office.” Fisher’s smile evaporated and he leaned forwards to look directly into the eyes of the soldier.
“I’ll be there with you, Miller,” he said quietly. “And just because I wear a suit now, don’t think I didn’t get my hands dirty. I’ve seen shit all over South America and the Persian Gulf, and that’s got me where I am. You don’t like your orders? Tough shit. I’d prefer you to be a willing participant in this, but I asked the president for a team of elite operators and he sent me you. If you’re not up to the job, I can request the US Army or the Marine Cor—”
“We’ll do it,” Miller interrupted before Fisher went on to commit further blasphemy. “Just don’t think we agree on everything.” He stood and replaced his headgear before fixing Fisher with a hard look. “You got that?”
“Got it!” Miller’s man, Hernandez, called from behind him after Miller had pointed out the low section of rocky beach he wanted to land at. The six SEALs had enough time to stow their gear and tool up for the immediate mission, as Miller reminded them that the sooner they got it out of the way, the sooner they could rest up in safety.
They had met as a team and thrown ideas out together after reading the briefing dossier on their newest enemy. It was simpler than understanding the fighting capabilities of a foreign power, because these things only had one tactic, and that tactic would be the same the world over.
They swarmed en masse, and they tried to eat you.
Miller had told them, over and over, that they would only engage small groups and lure them in ones and twos into their cargo net trap. Then, with their ‘volunteers’ snagged in the nets, they would drag them directly back to the facility on the island just off the mainland, without coming into contact with them and risking any of them catching a bite. Sure enough, those ‘volunteers’ would be wet through from being dragged along a small stretch of icy water, but he passed that off as a tactical choice, given that the reports from the British claimed that low temperatures slowed their movements.
What bothered him most of all was the reports of some of the infected displaying increased physical and mental abilities over the horde. As much as Grewal and Chambers wanted one of those, Miller was reluctant to make it his priority until he’d had his own boots on the ground and seen how badly the shit had really hit the fan.
Hernandez cut the engine before they neared the shore, floating in as silently as possible to bump and scrape the boat onto the rocks in the shallows before the others jumped out to drag it ashore. The bundled cargo net was carried out from the prow of their small, black inflatable and they patrolled fast up the shore to get away from their infiltration method just like they had drilled to do.
The fact that they were fighting a new kind of enemy didn’t register, but Miller wasn’t completely ignorant of having to adapt their tactics, which is why he assessed the narrow street of what appeared to have been a small coastal village and formulated the execution of his plan.
“Shepherd, Coleman,” he hissed in a low voice designed to carry only as far as it needed to. “Take the north and south rooftops over that chokepoint.” He indicated the empty street ahead with a bladed hand. “Hernandez, ready on the boat. Jackson, on me with the cargo net.”
“Where do you need me?” the youngest and newest member of their elite team asked. Miller smiled at the kid in the dark, not that he saw it.
“You’re the bait, Willy.”
“I’d like to formally lodge my complaint about this mission, Master Chief,” Walt Wilson complained quietly as he stood alone in the street. He didn’t mind being called Kid or Willy, hell he enjoyed the hazing as it meant the SEALs must have liked him to some degree, even if they hadn’t gone to war as a team until then. But what he didn’t like was being bait.
“Shut up,” one of the two Daves hissed from the low rooftop to his left. Miller and Jackson were out of sight too, keeping watch over their area of operations, leaving only Hernandez a few paces out to sea with the boat’s engine ticking over, ready to open the throttle wide.
“You’re doing fine,” Miller’s voice sounded low and reassuring, before he raised it slightly to encompass the whole team within earshot. “Flare out.”
A pop and a whooshing, hissing noise seared along the street, bathing the quaint abandoned houses in a fiery red glow. They stayed at high alert, every sense dialled way up in anticipation of their first encounter with the enemy. The flare burned fiercely ahead of their position, giving off more noise than they’d expected, but the sheer emptiness of the world, devoid of any trace of life, seemed to amplify any disruption to the silent dark.
As the glow began to fade and the noise abated, Miller’s nerves began to increase as he considered their next move.
Should he fire another flare and double-down on a tactic that might not work? Should he relocate his team and try the same thing further inland?
As he was weighing up the options, a voice cut through to focus him completely.
“Contacts. Three, approaching from the east.” Miller slowly inched his head around the side of the rough surface of the bricks to see three dark shapes silhouetted against the fading red light.
“Hold position,” he told his men. “Kid? Make a noise.”
“Make a…?” Wilson started to say before trailing off. He drew himself up, feeling alien as he stood tall out of cover, and cleared his throat.
“Yo!” he yelled, leaving the single syllable to echo down the artificial canyon of the terraced buildings.
“Yo?” Miller asked, chuckling. “First contact with the enemy and you decide to lead with ‘yo’?”
“Well,” Wilson shrugged, “you kinda put me on the spot… I didn’t know wh—”
“Look alive!” Coleman snapped from above them. They all snapped their focus back to their front, where the shouted word had sparked a slow, cumbersome approach to their position.
“I, er,” Wilson said. “I don’t like this…”
Miller ignored him. He carefully watched the three figures shambling closer through the red, smoky haze of the dying backlight. He was certain that none of them was the reported faster type, the ones who had been seen running and jumping instead of walking like drunks, but he also knew that they didn’t exactly have a mastery of their chosen battlefield.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 5