Reaching the dusty, dark privacy of the upper level, which looked as if it had been abandoned for its original purpose many years before, he used the precious possession of the green metal torch and its red-filtered lens to bathe an eerie glow on his task.
Reaching into his bag and working by feel, he pulled out the item he needed and used the sensitive tips of his fingers to locate the edge of the cellophane wrap and stretch out a length of it, then he used his teeth to cut the plastic and pull away a square to lay it on the ground. Carefully unfastening his belt, he lowered himself into position with the empty plastic bottle held in place for the secondary function, and tried to stay silent while he did what he needed to do. When he’d finished, he used some of the precious toilet paper flattened inside the top pocket of his pack. Wrapping the unpleasant bundle to seal the odour inside, so as not to attract the unwelcome attention of anything less than alive, he added a second layer of plastic wrap to the package and settled it neatly in a crevice far away from anywhere it could be found, allowing himself a smirk that perhaps one day, when their country was reclaimed, someone would find the preserved remains and open it for an unpleasant surprise.
Feeling much lighter and less uncomfortable, he settled himself against a pile of old, dusty sacks and found the spot more comfortable than he had been at ground level with the others. Despite the scratchy feel of the old, rat-eaten material, he found his eyelids getting heavier by the second as the crack of starlit blackness through the doors grew ever so slightly grey, until he drifted off into a light sleep that would last for barely an hour.
The dull crackle of a radio speaker tickled his consciousness, making him think that he hadn’t tuned his clock radio properly to one of the four stations he could get from his room. He reached out with his right hand, expecting to find the long, rectangular button that would allow him just a few more minutes of sleep before he really had to get up or face the consequences of having to be told to do something twice by either of his parents.
He groaned as he stretched, reaching out further to find his school clothes to pull them towards him and slip them on under his covers, but his hand didn’t touch folded cloth like he’d expected. Instead, it found the worn-down grip of the sawn off shotgun resting on top of the rough material of his pack. His small fingers explored it as his eyes stayed closed, finding the metal of the trigger guard cold to the touch, which served to send a bolt through him, like it was electrified.
His eyes flew open as the shouts of alarm from below cut through his reverie. Grabbing his bag with a gasp of panic—because any one of his companions shouting meant that there was imminent danger—he leapt up to join them, totally forgetting his environment and slamming his forehead hard into an exposed wooden beam of rough wood.
The blow didn’t knock him out, not out cold anyway, but it dealt enough of a blow to stun him sufficiently that he could only watch through a wide crack in the warped floorboards. He saw the rear end of their Warrior surging out of the barn in a cloud of thick exhaust smoke, to rip the doors off and let in a wash of dawn light. It also exposed the invading crowd of Screechers left moaning and following their escape to step and stumble over their crushed and partly destroyed comrades alike.
Peter didn’t move. He hoped they wouldn’t be able to detect him where he was, relying on the smells of so many warm-blooded people there, mixed with the thick fumes from the Warrior in the confined space, to sufficiently confuse the ones who remained there.
He watched, still face down on the exposed boards of the treacherous mezzanine, as the few who lacked the sense to follow the mobile can of zombie spam milled about beneath him like lost souls;
He didn’t panic, at least not at first, but instead watched one Screecher with fascinated interest as it moved uncertainly beneath him. It took three or four staggering steps in one direction, before stopping and throwing its head wildly from left to right in search of something, only to repeat the process over and over.
Inside the safety of his head, Peter gave a commentary to the Screecher’s behaviour, chuckling to himself as it amused him to imagine what it was thinking, if it could think. He watched it fly forwards again, knocking over his sticker—his modified pitchfork that had seen him through a number of sticky situations—as it froze and looked about, bewildered.
What the bloody hell did I come in here for? He heard in his head. The thought spoke in his mother’s voice, which didn’t bother him at first, but when the confused zombie repeated its behaviour, he heard the words spoken again with more venom, as if it was his fault that his mother had walked into a room without knowing why; blaming her only son instead of her alcoholism or her sick mind.
He scoffed involuntarily, and through the wide split between the two wooden boards where his right eye had a clear view of the ground below, he saw the confused zombie freeze and crane its neck awkwardly upwards until it stared straight at him. He didn’t breathe, waiting for the awful, ripping noise of the shriek he fully expected at any second. That shriek, he knew, would attract more of them. He could see it playing out from start to finish in his mind with brutal clarity. They would try to climb the old stairs, collapsing them and trapping him on the upper level. Even if any of them made it close enough to reach him without falling, he knew he could defend that narrow staircase until the end of time with nothing but a plank of wood.
If he had an endless supply of water and food, that was.
He knew he only carried enough water for a day or two, but after that he would be too weak to make any attempt at escape with a chance of survival above zero.
In a moment of realisation so sudden and overwhelming, he knew he had to escape now or else be trapped to die of dehydration over days of agony, when he would grow weaker and more delusional by the second.
Snatching up his backpack, he stood, not rising to his full height as the drying blood on his forehead, leaking from just inside his hairline, served as a harsh reminder, and he made for the stairs just as the noise hit him.
It wasn’t the noise of a shriek. Wasn’t the battle cry of a Screecher calling out the location of food to every other undead bugger in earshot. Instead, it was the very loud and oddly reassuring sound of heavy machine gun fire barking out big bullets a way down the road from him. He watched through the gaps in the floor again as the handful of confused undead still stuck in a time loop inside the barn made directly for the exit to follow the sounds of gunfire.
Granted the slightest of reprieves, Peter threw himself down the stairs as fast as he could, to break through a broken board five steps from ground level. He thumped down hard, banging his face painfully into the dirt, to be rewarded instantly with the taste of blood in his mouth. He scrambled to his feet, his fumbling right hand grasping desperately for the shaft of the pitchfork, to throw himself from the barn and turn instinctively in the direction where he saw the fewest undead shambling towards the building.
He ran, stopping and slipping in a painful slide that left him on his back as his feet backpedalled desperately to avoid another group rounding a corner further ahead. He got back to his feet, diverting his route towards a ladder set against the side of a large, low building and he attacked the rungs with as much speed as he could muster. Reaching a flat roof larger than the barn three times over, he lay on his back and listened to the sounds of gunfire getting further away with each echoing burst.
“They’re leading the herd away,” he told himself in a quivering whisper. “Then they’ll come back for me.” His eyes screwed shut and his mouth contorted as his body betrayed him and he began to break out in tears. He forced it away, managing to keep it at bay for a few seconds but then the tears came in a flood that he was unable to stop.
He cried angrily and silently to himself as he lay flat on his back on the roof, his chest heaving and his diaphragm spasming like an inconsolable toddler, all the while hearing the sounds of the engine and the gunfire fade away, as the only people he’d ever trusted since his sister was taken from him left him
all alone.
THIRTEEN
“In English, Doc,” Fisher said with a smirk that Grewal guessed was intended to make him seem confident. It didn’t, instead lending the American an added air of arrogance that made him marginally less likeable than he had previously been. Grewal sighed, not in an exhausted way in spite of the few hours’ uncomfortable sleep he’d had, but in a mentally tired way that conveyed just how much he enjoyed explaining complex matters to his intellectual inferiors. He sat, sucked in a breath and looked the CIA man in the eyes.
“The serum works within the very small and confined tests we’ve conducted. There is still a very long way to go to ensure that its lethality is fine-tuned sufficiently, bu—”
“That’s getting away from English again…” Grewal swallowed down the retort he knew his tiredness threatened to unleash, before answering in a measured tone.
“Stage one looks good,” he said in a strained voice that bordered dangerously on being too sarcastic. “Stages two to four need to go just as well before we can say we have a cure. What I really wan—”
“You dragged me all the way down here to tell me that you’d what? Got a gold star in a third grade math test?”
“I’d have come to you, only I’m not permitted to leave the facility,” he answered through gritted teeth, continuing before Fisher could interrupt again. “That’s not the breakthrough we’ve made, however.”
At the mention of the word ‘breakthrough’, Fisher shut his mouth and shot an expectant look at the scientist. Taking his uncharacteristic silence as permission to continue, Grewal spoke.
“I won’t bore you with the details,” he said sarcastically. “However, we made an unexpected discovery during testing yesterday.”
“This is how one of your lab rats ended up with a forty-five through the dome?” Grewal ignored the interruption, knowing Fisher’s silence was too good to be true.
“The subject became so animated that it literally broke itself apart trying desperately to get to the source of a simple noise.” Grewal held up both hands to keep Fisher quiet long enough to complete the report. “A soldier was trying to tune a radio set and stumbled on a patch of static that was barely audible to us. That frequency sent the subjects quite literally wild. It was like a feeding frenzy; like the phenomenon of sharks sensing blood in the water and becoming almost mindless with bloodlust. We need to harness that sound and utilise it to draw all of the infected into central locations where we can re-infect them with the completed serum.”
Fisher sat still, eyebrows almost meeting in the middle as he processed what he’d just been told.
“Sooo,” he answered, “you’re telling me you know their personal phone number? Their magic frequency? You know the sound that drives them wild and you want to use it as a lure?”
“The sound itself isn’t necessarily the real trigger, probably more likely that it simply simulates one of them, getting it agitated as it hunts or kills an uninfected host… like I said: blood in the water.”
“Huh,” Fisher answered, not bothering to explain his views any further.
“I thought that, perhaps, you could develop something that could deliver this frequency somehow,” Grewal tried hopefully.
“What?” Fisher said, seeming to reconnect with the conversation suddenly and recall the few words he’d missed. “Oh, we, er… we actually have something already for that. Just needs a few minor adjustments, I reckon.”
It was Grewal’s turn to look confused, which seemed to delight Fisher, who sat upright and glanced over the Professor’s shoulder towards the partially open door of the room he’d commandeered as his office. This he’d achieved by summarily ordering the two US army personnel resting there to find somewhere else to be.
“This is classified,” he began, then shrugged as though it didn’t really matter if he divulged the secret, as the enemy it had been designed to be deployed against no longer existed. “You’ve heard the term ‘Psy-Ops’?”
“Psychological warfare?” Grewal asked, his mind racing ahead to the conclusion but not saying it out loud in case he deflated the CIA man too much, given how excited he seemed to be by divulging state secrets.
‘Uh huh. See, we had this idea way back—like Vietnam way back—and we’d developed a battlefield sound emitter designed to degrade an entrenched enemy and force them to surrender or abandon a position that would otherwise be too costly in servicemen’s lives to take conventionally.” Grewal sat back and casually raised one knee over the other. He did it naturally, seeing nothing wrong with the gesture, but Fisher was distracted by it as he found it unnervingly effeminate. He shook his head slightly and carried on.
“It’s like a bomb,” he explained, moving his hands through the air as they described the smooth shape of the projectile. “Only there’s no warhead—no explosive charge—instead, this thing hits the dirt after being dropped from pretty much any altitude and cracks open like a nut. When the housing comes off… pow! The device inside activates and gives you eighteen to twenty-four hours of the worst high-pitched screaming and white noise you could imagine.”
“Why don’t they just blow it up?”
“What?”
“The device,” Grewal asked. “Why wouldn’t the enemy just destroy it?”
Fisher hesitated. “It, er… it should be too painful to get near for starters. Like, agony, to be anywhere near it.”
“Irrelevant,” Grewal said half to himself. “The infected subjects would just try to eat it, I imagine. So, how soon can we have a few and how quickly can they be retrofitted to emit the low frequency sound?”
“Hold up there, Doc,” Fisher said defensively and leaned away as though warding off his enthusiasm. “I mean, there are channels to go through here. I can’t just call up Langley and say, “Hey, remember those weapons we have mothballed in the basement? The ones that were probably war crimes waiting to happen? Yeah, I’ll take four to go. With mustard. Can you deliver?”
Grewal stared back at him, not finding the sarcasm amusing in the slightest. Fisher deflated, his shoulders sagging as his fingertips rubbed the skin at his temples to distort the shape of his eyes.
“I’ll place a call,” he said, “see if I still have any sway back home.” He nodded his chin to the doorway, which Grewal took, with awkward grace, as his dismissal. Fisher stooped to pick up a heavy plastic case from the threadbare carpet and set it on the small desk in the room as Grewal stepped outside, pausing at the top of the stairs to peer back through the gap and eavesdrop on the one-sided conversation.
Fisher went through the laborious process of setting up the satellite phone and dialling the correct sequence of digits to reach his superiors at Langley. The call bounced around through a couple of extensions until the right people were located, and a glance at his watch made him curse his own stupidity as he realised he’d called the Pentagon at a little before eight a.m. their time.
“Hellard here,” came the gruff, almost fatherly voice from the other side of the Atlantic.
“Sir, it’s Fisher. With the science team sent to Scotl—”
“I’m well aware of who and where you are, Agent Fisher,” the older man interrupted, belying the kindly tone he usually employed to be his professional front. “Have you found a cure to the ‘problem’ yet?”
“We’re working on that, Sir,” Fisher stammered quickly before getting directly to the point of his call. “Sir, we’ve made a discovery here that would make a number of options more viable if it worked…”
“Well, spit it out, Son!”
“I—we—need as many of the prototype TSE devices and some engineers to re-tune them as you can muster. Long story real short, Sir, we think we can attract them into forming large groups which, as I said, will make more than one of our tactical solutions much simpler and more effective.”
“Wait a minute,” Bob Hellard, deputy director of the CIA, said coldly. “The United States is currently expending significant energy and resources in monitoring the behav
iour of those infected in the UK.” His words sounded as though he was standing before a closed meeting of the senate asking for budgetary increases. “And now you want to use a prototype device to intentionally draw them into herds or whatever?”
“Sir,” Fisher said flatly, as if he was dropping the bullshit. “If this project doesn’t work out, then I don’t need to explain it to you that having them concentrated in the major cities will make it much easier to wipe the slate clean again so we can repopulate.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, during which Fisher didn’t speak. He barely even breathed. In his mind, the next person to speak and fill the void in the conversation was the one to lose, and his career was staked on the mission being a success. Many had simply wanted to nuke Britain and seal off Europe, especially now that the news out of their west coast was just as bleak. He knew their maritime forces were stretched thin enough maintaining constant coastal patrols, not to mention the concerns of many that a horde would walk over the frozen expanses from Russia to Canada with the next winter. But if he could provide the solution to controlling the movements of the infected until they could be purged, either by napalm or whatever artificial virus-killing virus the scientist was cooking up, then the people of America could sleep soundly thanks to him.
That was why his explanation featured the word ‘we’ so heavily.
“You’ll get your toys, Fisher,” Hellard said finally. “And an air crew to deliver them. But I expect results by the end of the week.” The connection was cut before Fisher could respond, but the abruptness of the call ending did nothing to stifle his sense of achievement.
Outside the door, still and silent, Professor Grewal fought down the urge to storm back into the room and demand an explanation for the terms, ‘wipe the slate clean’ and ‘repopulate’. Instead, he melted away, returning to his foul-smelling cow shed lab to continue working on one of the few things on the planet he could actually affect.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 10