“Fellers,” he said as they approached.
“You ain’t fucking taking that,” one of them said, the one not holding the shotgun, before Daniels could say anything else. “It doesn’t belong to you.”
“No?” Daniels asked, still keeping his hand holding the gun very still, but his eyes focused on the twitching man behind the speaker. The man was shifting his grip on the shotgun nervously, as though his palms were slick with sweat that was preventing him from holding it steady. Daniels recognised that as a bad sign.
“Who does it belong to then?”
“Her Majesty the Queen,” the speaker sneered with sarcastic nastiness at him, as though invoking royalty made his point any more valid.
“Whom I serve,” Daniels answered calmly. “Do you?” The man bristled, nostrils flaring as his own argument was turned on him in an instant.
“I’ve paid taxes all my life,” he snarled. “What about you, Mal?”
“Yep,” croaked shotgun man from over his right shoulder.
“So, we’ve probably paid for that over the years, along with whatever pittance you earned driving it.”
“First off,” Daniels said as a flutter of movement caught his peripheral vision. The two men saw his reaction and began to turn to look, so he spoke louder to get their attention back.
“First off,” he said louder, earning stares from both of them, “I’ve paid more tax than they’ve paid me.” That was a clear lie, but it never helped to let on how much his second career was worth back in the world. “So, I’ve paid for it too, if that’s your way of thinking.”
“Pfft,” the speaker scoffed at him, as though the childish dismissal of his logic would win the argument. “You’re not taking it, anyway.”
“Yes, we are,” Daniels said, still cool. Shotgun man, his nerve breaking as his minute vocabulary was already exhausted, growled and raised the gun to point it at him. Daniels smiled and took a pace to his right, putting the speaker directly in between him and the gun. Both men opened their eyes wide in surprise at being so easily thwarted, and both recognised that they were in water beyond their depth.
Shotgun man was saved from having to make any decision by the hollow, sickeningly solid-sounding clunk of wood striking bone. Daniels leaned past speaker man, who had whipped around at the alien sound, seeing the shotgun fall to the grass as his bodyguard’s eyes rolled back in his head. Toppling like a felled tree to thump into the damp earth at his feet, he dropped to reveal an angry and impatient Ellie, who appreciatively weighed the pick-axe handle in her hand, suggesting that she could get used to the feel of it. Her eyes snapped up to offer speaker man a slow, wicked smile.
Daniels tapped him on the shoulder and cleared his throat, asking him if he wouldn’t mind awfully fucking off.
Two minutes later, long enough to retrieve the shotgun and the belt of cartridges to accompany it, the corporal and his two young female companions rolled towards the exit of their country house and towards the lonely sentry who faced a choice of whether to attempt to accost them or not.
He evidently decided against it, instead choosing to melt away into the shadows, no doubt to claim that he hadn’t seen them leave. Daniels drove, seeing as the teenage girl would never be let loose on the controls for anything other than pretend, and the scowling young woman, Ellie, showed no inclination to do anything other than sit in a canvas seat and wait.
“Stop,” Jessica yelled over the sound of the barking, whistling engine. She repeated it, louder this time, until Daniels heard her and eased off the throttle. What she’d seen from her elevated position behind him, with an infinitely wider field of view than his own, was obviously beyond his vision and he trusted her enough to slow to a dead crawl.
Over the quieter sound of the vehicle rolling forwards, he heard a new voice shouting.
“Wait!” it yelled; desperation conveyed through the single, shouted word. Unable to see clearly to the right side of the Sultan, he popped open the forward hatch and tried to lean out enough to see a young man running towards them with his arms full of clothing and possessions which he was trying and failing to shove into a backpack affixed to a metal frame. Jessica, self-appointed as the gatekeeper for their escape, called down to him.
“Who are you?” the words sounded blunt and judgemental, hasher than Daniels knew was actually the girl’s personality.
“I’m coming with you,” the man said, running towards the front of the rolling vehicle and shouting at the driver.
“Charlie, stop for fuck’s sake!” At the use of his first name, Daniels hit the brakes to bring the Sultan to a creaking stop.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s Steve! Steve Duncan,” the man yelled back, lobbing his half-packed bag up on the front of the vehicle and clambering up behind it. Daniels hadn’t worked with the man directly, but he knew him well enough. He was originally from the admin troop of their now scattered squadron, and hadn’t been with them long, having only recently come through the basic training courses to be attached to their reserve unit.
“Where’s your weapon?” Daniels asked him, seeing the man was wearing his webbing over civilian clothes but not finding the shape of the sterling sub machine gun he should be in possession of.
“Still in the armoury,” he answered. “Some wanker’s there blocking the door and mouthing off about having you arrested for assaulting someone.” He dropped inside the hatch to follow his mess of kit and seemed shocked to see the two female occupants. He nodded and smiled at Jessica, who smiled back and waved. Then he turned to do a double-take at Ellie, colouring up slightly as he mumbled something which was drowned out by the revs building back up to lurch them onwards away from the house.
Duncan sat at Daniels’ usual seat, lifting the headset to speak more clearly to him.
“Getting clear and heading west?” he asked.
“I reckon so,” Daniels answered. “No chance of getting west ahead of them with the bridge out. And besides, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were already this side of the main road.”
“Exactly,” Duncan answered, “why the hell didn’t anyone else believe the report?” Daniels’ reply made him tick off the reasons in his head, which all made sense.
“Because it came from me,” Daniels told him. “Because it was based on a report from the Yanks, and because people are comfortable so they don’t want to believe it.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Jessica’s voice cut in on their conversation. Duncan spun to look at her, seeing her holding the large earphones over her head and her eyes burning into him for an answer. He opened his mouth to speak, feeling more than a little nailed to the spot by the forthright girl, but Daniels saved him from responding.
“They don’t want to believe they aren’t safe there,” he explained. “They like their little slice of freedom and they don’t want the status quo to change.”
“Status Quo? What’s the band got to d—” Jessica began, stopping herself before she asked the embarrassing question.
“The people who stayed,” Ellie explained, her own ears covered with the headset normally reserved for the vehicle commander, “were the ones who didn’t want to leave with the army. They don’t like other people making rules for them to follow, so they’re not going to give up their new life now.”
“Even with the chance of a horde of those things bearing down on them,” Duncan added, glancing at the woman and locking eyes with her to show he understood her perfectly.
“So they don’t want to believe they’re in danger because it doesn’t fit in?” Jessica asked.
“Yeah,” Duncan said. “I tried to tell them, even the other lads,” he said to mean the few remaining squadron men who hadn’t left under orders, “but nobody wanted to listen.”
Silence filled their earphones as all four of them were left in quiet contemplation.
“Speaking of listening,” Daniels said as he turned the nose of the Sultan to head north up a farm track, instead of driving towards
the main road where he half expected to see the leading ranks of a detachment from the dead army approaching, “get on that radio and call up the SSM.”
“I can do it,” Jessica said excitedly, clawing her way through the interior to get to the seat beside their newest crew member, “Charlie taught me how it works.”
“Foxtrot-three-three-Alpha,” she said into the radio, her lips forming the words in their uncommon combination with concentration.
As the sun began to sink to their left, the leading edge of the swarm found themselves suddenly dropping from their path as the roadway under their shambling feet fell away to nothingness.
The rubble below in the narrow, muddy creek bed was rapidly added to with the writhing mess of twitching, moaning bodies, and the inexorable flow of dead followed the precise course of action that corporal Daniels had predicted. Even though they were dead, they still followed the same generic behaviour of living humans and inevitably followed the path of least resistance. Much in the same way that water always flowed in the easiest direction to follow the unbreakable laws of physics, they spilled out of the small riverbed and poured down the slope in the general direction of the low rise hiding the large country house from sight.
Nothing from that direction overtly attracted them; there were no smells or sounds that could carry that far to serve as a lure. But the swarm was so inexorable, such a self-perpetuating phenomenon, and the noise the leading rank made attracted more behind them. This pushed them onwards, making more noise which, in turn, brought on more from the creek bed and road, the slowest of which were in danger of being left behind, without a reason to go on. These stragglers were abandoned to wander in response to the flutter of a bird’s wings or a gust of wind rustling the first early leaves on a tree.
That momentum gathered, sparking the small percentage of Limas in their midst to surge ahead, to leap and climb over the slower-moving bodies of their subordinates and force their way to the front where new sensations piqued their primal instincts.
Smells, brought like the ghost of a whisper on the wind, turned their heads to the large buildings on the lower ground. Their direction of movement was followed when the rest of the swarm, as if sensing the excitement of their front runners, sped up their own advance and began to moan and issue occasional shrieks. Those noises quickened the pace of those behind, setting off the chain reaction that would whip the thousand former people into a frenzy which the unprepared and hopelessly under-equipped residents of the big house could never hope to defeat. Vehicles fled not long after the first ranks appeared on the horizon, but the exodus was too little, too late. Some of those vehicles caused a large mob of the main assault to break away and follow the sounds of revving engines north, sparking off another chain of events that would prove catastrophic.
The unorthodox crews of two armoured vehicles settled in for the night; one fully closed down in the open and the other shut inside a large farm shed. They all heard the faint sounds of heavy gunfire in the distance, denoting a desperate defence which they all hoped would be successful, even if they knew deep down it would not be.
TEN
“Oh, dear God!” Professor Grewal cried as the contents of the cargo net thrashed and hissed and shrieked at him and his small team. “What are we supposed to do with these?”
“Not my problem,” Miller answered flatly, hiding the enjoyment he was lapping up from frightening the British scientist. With a hand signal, he and his team melted away from the makeshift lab, having fulfilled their responsibilities for the night and leaving to get something to eat and some sleep.
Grewal, left with a lethal cargo and no way to control it, turned desperately with pleading eyes aimed at the man from the US army’s infectious diseases department. The man, a sergeant as far as Grewal could make out from the multiple stripes on his sleeve, smirked.
“Alright, boys,” he said, “suit up. Doc, you might wanna get yourself clear for this part…”
Four of the soldiers, all wearing heavily padded suits with an outer layer of thick, rubbery material and plastic visors covering their faces, approached the cargo net which had been dragged into a large caged area. The taut ropes keeping the mouth of the net closed were loosened, and the suited soldiers stepped forwards with long poles complete with loops of heavy wire sprouting from the ends. Grewal recognised them as the kind of thing used to secure and control dangerous dogs, and he had to admit that the principle was an easily transferrable one.
With a lot of yelling and a few tense moments when one of the soldiers was forced onto his back by the attacks of the soaked and shrieking beasts, eventually both of them were secured, each with two poles looped around their neck. The difficulty came then when they couldn’t figure out how to drag them out of the larger cage and into the smaller ones where they could be used as lab rats.
“Fuck this shit,” the sergeant said, reaching up to strip off his own helmet and rummage in his removed equipment to retrieve a cigarette and lighter. He struck flame to the end of a smoke and inhaled deeply, his eyes closed, before he stepped forwards and opened the cage.
“Alright, assholes,” he announced, gaining the instant and undivided attention of the thrashing corpses. He blew smoke at them and brought up both hands to gesture them forward. “If you’ll step right this way, thaaat’s it, keep following the sound of my voice…” he paced backwards, luring them towards him as both bubbled and tried to shriek at their slowly escaping meal. One by one, they were corralled into individual cages, the loops being removed from their necks before the team took off their suits and began to scrub them down with a strong-smelling bleach solution.
“Draw straws for the next time,” their sergeant said, “unless one of you screws up, then being the bait can be your reward. Oh, hey, Docs.” This last was aimed at Grewal and Chambers, who had re-entered ahead of their own team. “All yours. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to stick your fingers through the bars. These animals may bite…”
“No,” Grewal answered, “you don’t.”
“Your team are staying here, though, right?” Chambers added. In answer, the sergeant raised his eyes to a section of the shed elevated about twenty feet from the floor. Up there, just visible in the gloom, was a pair of soldiers sitting behind a heavy machine gun, ready to end the experiment should anything go awry. Chambers nodded his understanding, turning to give his orders.
“Full tissue samples,” he ordered them. “Run everything from the beginning. Blood, DNA, everything. And anyone getting themselves bitten will find themselves instantly dismissed from this team.” A heavy clunk of metal sounded from behind him, prompting all of them to turn and look.
“Anyone gets themselves bit,” the sergeant said dourly, his hand still resting on the heavy semi-automatic pistol he had produced, “and I’ll personally guarantee your dismissal from the human race through the medium of my forty-five.” They all stared at him, waiting for his face to crack and betray the fact that he was joking. His face, however, stayed resolute and the awkward silence extended until the lead scientist cleared his throat for their attention.
“Get the samples,” Grewal told them, “set up the tests and then we can get some sleep. We’ll deal with the results in the morning.”
Grewal watched as the grunt work of their scientific mission was undertaken. He hung back, offering such encouragement as he thought fit in the form of loud tutting and the occasional patronising slow shake of his head. Seeing the suspicious and permanently scowling sergeant still sitting cradling the large handgun he’d threatened them with, he drew himself up to his full, if meagre, height and approached him.
“I’d prefer,” he began, his courage abandoning him slightly as the sergeant’s head turned slowly to glare at him. He made a low noise in his throat, as though he wanted to cough but fought the urge. “I’d prefer it if you weren’t quite so… hostile, to my staff.”
“I’d prefer it if you weren’t such an asshole,” he replied without a trace of humour. “But we
don’t often get what we want now, do we?”
“What’s your name?” Grewal demanded, as if the implied threat of a complaint could frighten the man.
“Yates. Staff Sergeant Yates.”
“Well, Staff Sergeant Yates, as I said I’d pref—”
“I heard you,” Yates snarled quietly. “I also don’t give a shit. You and your little science project set the whole goddam world on fire, and now me and my people are putting our lives at risk so you can do it again. You want a,” he sarcastically air-quoted with his finger, “less hostile work environment? Don’t kill half the people in the goddam world. Period.”
Grewal shut his mouth and backed away, watching the sergeant lean back in his uncomfortable chair to resume staring at the two bedraggled creatures in their cages, who had given up their frantic shrieking and were satisfied just to moan and chew at the heavy mesh to try and get to the living.
He waited in the shadows of the barn lab until the samples were taken and placed in the chillers to await the response to the serum he and Chambers had developed.
Finding a way to attack the virus had been a simple thing to approach, but a very difficult one to refine. Using highly infectious host carriers to deliver it, as he had with the original disease, was his first and only thought on the matter, but he was anxious to see how the tests fared in a real-world experiment. Using something aggressive had been automatic for him, and he toyed with a few possibilities.
He experimented with the world’s newest killer virus on professor Chambers’ insistence: HIV; despite his concerns that the rate of degradation would be too slow for his style. The biggest problem with that disease was that it killed its human hosts by attacking their natural ability to defend themselves through their immune system. Given that the infected didn’t respond with their immune system, the early tests had failed to give them any kind of positive results.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 7