“They were already up in the air and had eyes on this swarm not long after it formed—my guess is that there were a lot of Screechers still hanging around after the island—and this is after months of the Yanks not making contact.”
“So, you think they knew about the swarm before it happened?” Bufford grilled him, leaning in to see the man’s face and gauge the answers his expression would give when his words would not.
“Something like that,” Daniels answered, still frowning pensively. “What if they weren’t looking for a swarm specifically? What if they were monitoring the county to see if the Screechers responded to something?”
“All you can eat buffet?” Bufford asked sarcastically. “One of those raves for Screechers?”
“Weapons test?” Johnson asked, unable to keep the hint of trepidation from his voice.
“What?” interrupted a small voice from behind them. They turned or craned their necks to see Peter approaching, his older sister following close behind almost uncertainly now that she was no longer the protector of a frightened, naïve young boy. “Some kind of thing that calls them all to one place?”
They all stared at him for a second before exchanging silent looks with one another.
“Well, they were all heading in one direction, weren’t they?” Peter went on, not put off by their attention or fearing adults like he used to. “And the faster ones were all at the front with the slower ones behind, so that makes sense…”
“It does make good sense,” Astrid said, having wandered in to join the impromptu pow-wow. “Do any of you have an alternative suggestion?”
“I get that we’re all interested in this and all… aargh,” Hampton said with a groan as he put his stiff leg up on a low stack of car batteries. “But what difference does it make really? So what if someone’s fucking abou—”
“Ahem,” Ellie cut in, having been the last to join the group’s congregation.
“—if someone’s playing silly buggers with the Screechers and sending them all to one place, as long as that place isn’t where we’re going, I present the case that we accept that fact and carry on about our business.”
“What the sergeant’s trying to say,” Enfield said in his calm and controlled voice, “is that we’re wasting braincells on a problem we don’t need to deal with. Not yet, anyway.”
“Exactly,” Hampton agreed. “Thank you, Marine Enfield. Next time I need you to speak for me, I’ll shove my hand up your jacksie and use you like a puppet.” Hampton was joking, although only those who’d spent the last winter with them would know that the marines never needed to exchange harsh words or fall back on the rank structure to get anything done.
Enfield held Hampton’s gaze, even when the sergeant waggled his eyebrows once and muttered, “all the way to the elbo—”
“But they were heading north,” Kimberley asked. “Scotland’s north. Who’s to say they aren’t all heading for where the others are?” Johnson opened his mouth to softly explain what she’d missed, hoping that nobody else beat him to it, as the thought of her feeling embarrassed or shamed in any way stung him. He was beaten to it, but in such a kindly and commanding way that he found his feelings move from protective fear to something resembling immense pride. And a healthy dose of protectiveness.
“Because we went east,” Peter told her, beckoning her towards the table where he looked at the map for a moment, trying to get his bearings. He’d evidently been watching earlier as the soldiers had discussed it, because his eyes were lingering on roughly the correct grid squares before Johnson tapped a gnarled fingertip on an area to the east and slightly south of the place he’d identified as their current location. “Since the…” he swallowed and shook himself like a twitch overtook him. “Since the farm, we went this way. Corporal Daniels told Mister Johnson that they were going south to north to begin with, and the Screechers we saw were going east to west.” With each directional description, the young boy ran his finger in the relevant compass point flow. Johnson saw Kimberley hiding a smile that he knew would not be out of amusement at the boy playing grown-up, but would be from genuine pride.
“So they’re all heading to a single point which is west from here and northwest of where the others started off?” Kimberley asked him, having leapt far ahead of his explanation logically but taking a brief moment to let him develop his confidence.
“So, it would make sense that if we went north we’d see them heading southwest,” Peter concluded.
“Only they’ve stopped,” Johnson said. “About eight miles back. No obvious reason why.”
“Could be the range of whatever’s attracting them. Like blood in the ocean attracting sharks over a certain distance.” A few faces grimaced at the analogy.
“That’s Hollywood rubbish,” Bufford chimed in, sounding almost bored as though he’d had the conversation before. “I’ve been in the water all over the world and sharks don’t go into a frenzy just because someone cut themselves shaving or got stabbed multiple times.” He added an unapologetic shrug which raised more questions than it dismissed about his history of underwater activities.
“Regardless,” Johnson said, rolling up the map and raising his voice a little to change the subject and take charge. With more civilians and two more soldiers, he felt as though order needed to be restored. Him taking charge wasn’t an arrogance—if anyone more capable who he trusted to guide their choices was there, he’d happily take instruction rather than give it—but things needed to be done.
“We’ve got maybe two days of water on our wagon. What about your lot, Charlie?” Daniels looked abashed as though he’d failed his sergeant major.
“A day. And food. We left in a bit of a hurry…”
“We were the same,” Hampton added as he idly picked at a piece of hard skin by a fingernail with the small blade of a folding knife. He saw the attention his actions were receiving and mumbled a reassurance that he hadn’t stabbed any Screechers with the knife before. “We had two canteens full and are down to half that now. We also didn’t get any food on the way out the door on account of not having been there long and some cock-jockey of a civvy trying to tell us what to do.”
Priorities needed addressing, and for once, Johnson missed how simple that small matter had been over winter. There had been weeks at a time when fresh snowfall could be collected and allowed to defrost, and that didn’t take into account their comfortable home—before the village had been destroyed—that still enjoyed running water.
“First things first,” Johnson said, looking to Enfield, who was already lifting the small rifle and bending to pick up the large, padded gun slip. He held out the smaller weapon to Peter, who hadn’t held it since he helped the marine sight it for the first time so long, and yet not so long ago. Enfield headed for the steel staircase leading up to the half-mezzanine floor but Peter hesitated and glanced behind him. He smiled at his sister, who seemed to give a small nod of permission before he turned back to follow and swallowed down his recent memories of steel ladders and mezzanine floors.
Sentry duties covered, Johnson then recruited Bufford to lead a small recce and see what the immediate area offered. He would ordinarily have asked Astrid to go too, but she was displaying a post-adrenaline exhaustion that would make her reactions sloppy. Coupled with the fact that her weapon was filthy through firing and her ammunition count was incredibly low, he tactfully left her out of any plans.
“I’ll come with you, Buffs,” he said, picking up his gifted MP5 from the table and walking away. “Bill?” he shot back to Hampton, who smiled sweetly in comical response. “Square everything away in here and set about seeing if there’s anything we can use?”
TWENTY-THREE
“Yo’s in place,” Jackson said to Miller in a quiet voice. The team was looking forward to this fetch and carry mission, because it required the liberal application of bullets to the heads of infected monsters. They weren’t bloodthirsty or callous, not overtly at any rate, but the SEALs were becoming frustr
ated by being in sight and smell—oh dear God, the smell—of the enemy. Miller nodded and took up position, wishing for the third time in the last half hour that he’d brought the Colt rifles from the ship’s armoury in addition to the loadout he had opted for, to keep their noise profile as small as possible.
He reassured himself that these things didn’t wear any kind of protection, and a five-five-six round went through a skull or a face just as well as the 9mm they carried did.
“Okay,” he said, after checking the action on his weapon again, “light it up.”
Flares were activated and tossed ahead of them, and the briefcase device—their new, non-human yo—was set a little way behind the cargo net. Even before the device was switched on, the flares revealed two shadowy figures shambling awkwardly, drunkenly down the hill towards them. They’d elected a new spot for trapping, as they had every time they’d been sent to the mainland for test subjects, only this time they would get to end the suffering of more than a few before they hopefully got what they came for.
“They’re slow ones,” Shepherd said in a low voice, asking permission with his tone.
“Okay,” Miller told them, “nice and slow. Take your time and mark your shots.”
It took a few seconds for the suppressed snapping sounds to start coughing from the barrels of their guns. The first wave of shambling enemy fell quickly, the sudden absence of their moans swelling those coming on from behind, much in the way bees would respond if you swatted one too close to their hive. It was like a pheromone was released when one died, which made the others coming behind even angrier, and when a commotion at the back of the slow advance cut the air with a spine-chilling shriek, they knew their target was in play.
“We got one incoming,” Miller barked to his men. “Hernandez, you get ready to hit the gas. Daves, fall back and keep shooting. Jackson, Kid? Cover and move. Go!”
Slick and professional, the two Daves—Coleman and Shepherd—stopped firing and fell back, keeping their profiles low so as not to interfere with the shots of Jackson and Wilson. Miller was already behind the slung net, standing tall in plain view as the two moving men stopped, turned, and began lining up headshots at the advance so the other two could fall back under cover of their fire.
It was a natural thing to maintain their fire discipline and training, even if this enemy didn’t fire back, because to learn something different now would mean to lose the years of muscle memory, of ingrained training, and would run the risk of them not knowing instinctively what to do when the shit hit the fan.
Too many of them were approaching now, so Miller gave orders to start slowing them down instead of wasting time with a careful headshot which required a good aim.
“Kneecaps,” he called out. “Drop the bastards and slow them down. We need the fast one to reach the net first.” He raised his own weapon and began rattling bullets ahead of them in controlled three-round bursts, by flicking the safety catch down two notches.
To his left and right, he heard the rattle of near-continuous gunfire interspersed with his team calling out their magazine changes. Cycling his own weapon like he’d fired a hundred thousand rounds through one—which he guessed he probably had—he removed the pressure from the trigger as another shriek sounded close to the leading edge of the advance. It burst through the front rank and stopped, bone-thin arms held low and away from its skeletal body with fingers splayed out like claws, staring directly at him.
In the half-second it did that—the half second that felt like an excruciating minute to Miller—he stole a fleeting glance down at the case at his feet. He didn’t have time to marvel at how effective the device was, and yet it was its very success that had contracted his life and the lives of his men into that tiny warzone on the edge of the icy cold water off the western coast of Scotland.
“Get rea—” he began saying, just as it crouched down and burst towards him, lumbering fast like an animal charging him head-on.
“Break, break, break!” Jackson yelled, telling all of them to get clear of the net. “Hernandez, now!”
The SEALs scattered, running and rolling and yelling as the sound of the outboard motor of their boat gunned it to maximum with no preamble. Miller moved, feeling that familiar bullet-time phenomenon as his mind and senses operated at a level that cycled information faster that the rest of him. His legs seemed to take an age to respond. When they did, his boots moved so slowly over the sandy shale of the beach that he might just as well have been in the water up to his waist. Slowly, desperately, he ran to his left as the rope connecting the left side of the net to the boat accelerating away to sea began to go taut and lift from the wet ground so fast that it left the water soaked into its fibres behind. He threw himself over it, sailing through the dark, cold air at waist height just as the shriek off to his right sounded both impossibly close and impossibly loud.
He hit the wet sand with a thud and spun to bring his weapon up. All around him, the gunfire had started again as he stared at the living, shrieking whirlwind of limbs that was the faster one fighting against the heavy, wet fibres of the net trapping it.
“We need to get the fuck outta here, Miller!” Jackson barked at him as he stopped firing long enough to click in a replacement magazine and charge the weapon. “Last mag!” he added.
Miller snapped out of it, jumping up and raising his weapon once more to empty the magazine in bursts aimed at head height into the ranks of the infected backlit by the red flare, still advancing on them. They retreated back towards the water before Miller spun and jogged back towards the thrashing net, calling for the others to cover him. Reaching down for the handle of the case that was just a little too effective at riling up the infected, a bony hand with broken and ragged fingernails shot out of a gap in the net to claw at his left calf muscle. Even through the thick trouser leg, he felt the sharpness of the attempt to drag him into the snapping teeth he could hear but not see. He tugged his leg away hard, hearing a snap that could easily have been bone, and reached down again for the case.
The thing trapped inside reared up on its knees and lunged. Miller reacted on instinct, applying force with the nearest weapon on his body to the closest target on his enemy.
His right knee crunched cruelly into the face of his attacker in the dying light and freed him to scramble away. The team, still firing and moving, splashed into the black water where Hernandez had brought their small boat back in to collect them, before opening up the throttle again and dragging the writhing bundle out to sea.
Professor Grewal waited eagerly, fighting the urge to administer doses of serum to the remaining three test subjects to satisfy his anxiety that it would randomly be ineffective against them.
Every test conducted so far, through every means of exposure, had resulted in the catastrophic haemorrhaging of the infected subject and resulted in death. Or at least permanent death.
He paced, unable to stay still with nervous anticipation of what the unsmiling, bearded soldiers were bringing back. They had been deployed specifically to bring back one of the faster ones, and only one of the faster ones. They seemed pleased to be given the green light to start executing the infected people, and the report via radio that they had succeeded caused the makeshift lab to erupt in fist-clenching, high-fiving celebration.
The wait for them to return had been agonising, and more than a few false starts had deflated the excitement when people claimed to have heard a boat engine. The last false alarm had been a female lab technician who pointed inland with her claim, and her beratement was still ongoing when a voice called out from the seaward entrance to the large outbuilding.
“Here’s your goddamned fast one, asshole,” Miller snarled, dropping the rope he was holding, with the rest of his team following suit to leave a soaked, writhing, shrieking bundle. Grewal had no time to respond to their arrival or the insult as Yates barked orders at his team to suit up and secure the subject.
Subject, Grewal scoffed to himself internally. It’s much easier to cal
l them that than acknowledge what they really are.
This one had been a young woman. Tall and probably thin to begin with, given that the remnants of clothing she wore didn’t seem baggy on her. It was obvious to anyone who had observed the behaviour of the infected for any amount of time that she was different; her movements were faster, sharper, and her blind eyes above a viciously broken nose that still oozed dark gore zeroed in with a terrifying speed and accuracy on anyone who spoke.
In spite of Yates’ strict instructions, his team struggled to loop the thick wires on poles over the matted strands of lank hair and had hit her in the skull hard enough to knock off chunks of grey skin and expose the bone beneath.
“Be careful of the head, we need her alive!” Chambers shouted at them, earning a salvo of savage looks which all spoke of an invitation to pick up a pole and show them all how it was done. He got the message loud and clear but still flinched every time the skull was impacted. Grewal ignored the ‘alive’ part of his warning and prepared a dose of serum in the same aerosol dispenser he’d used the first time.
A shout of alarm behind him made him spin. No words reached his ears; only the guttural yell of primal fear as though a Neanderthal was being attacked by a predator.
Grewal decided that what he could see actually matched that description perfectly, as the subject had thrown off one of her captors and grabbed the heavy pole attached to her neck to swing it around savagely. Yates was standing directly in front of her—it—and ducked to save himself but ultimately doomed the soldier on the other side, who took the full ballistic force of the swinging pole in the side of the head to be knocked out.
Untethered on both flanks, the thing snapped its gaze to lock onto Yates and advanced on him, forcing him backwards. It writhed and thrashed as it moved, like a feral cat wearing a collar, until the force of its efforts dislodged the coil of wire from around its neck.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 17