Before any elation could spread, it exhibited a kind of seizure and shuddered as if in agony or racked by a sudden bout of epilepsy. It stopped, going still as they all stood and stared, before it relaxed finally to be at peace. Chambers stayed crouched down, still staring at the face, which had regained a hint of emotion before it went slack.
“Dick?” Grewal said gently from beside and above him. Chambers looked up at him, seeing him offer a sterile steel tray to take the severed hand he was still clutching like a prized possession. Chambers held it out for him, dropping the hand just as the tray fell away to clatter onto the hard ground. Time moved slowly for him, while the others in the room seemed to move fast to throw their bodies away from him. Then he turned his head back to face the cage.
Those eyes, no longer milky but bloodshot white with a jet black iris, were wide open and fixed on him. The creature flew forwards, its remaining hand shooting out of the gap with perfect accuracy to grab him by the sleeve, hauling him forwards. Chambers screamed. He screamed with the terror of what was happening, even if he didn’t fully understand it, and he screamed with the pain of his index finger being bitten clean off between the first and second knuckles with a bite force the rational part of his brain couldn’t believe belonged to a human body.
A gunshot erupted again, loud and close, and Chambers scrambled away from the cage, clamping his left hand hard around his right wrist, with speckles of dark gore patterned over his face. He blinked it away but felt the sting of the sticky fluid on his eyeball as strong hands hauled him upwards.
A tourniquet was lashed around his right forearm and twisted to be painfully tight as voices fought for space in his brain. One shushed him, telling him in an American accent that everything was going to be okay. Another screamed repeatedly in a deep voice, which only paused briefly for the man making the awful sound to refill his lungs and start again.
“Too late,” a gruff voice said over him. “It’s all over his face. Can’t guarantee there’s no infection.” He recognised the army sergeant’s harsh tone and connected it with the sound of a gun’s hammer being cocked.
“No,” another voice—Grewal’s voice—snapped. “Wait, please.”
Grewal ran to the sample fridge, knocking aside a panicked lab assistant in his desperate haste to fetch a fresh vial of serum. Opting for the direct application method, he stabbed a syringe into the rubber section in the lid and tipped it up to draw out an unmeasured amount of the clear fluid before squeezing the plunger to force the air from it. Not bothering to find a vein, he jabbed it hard into Chambers’ shoulder and depressed the plunger to fill the muscle with the cold liquid.
“It’s his only chance,” Grewal’s voice drifted to him as the fever began to burn him up faster than he expected.
Professor Richard Chambers had precisely zero percent chance of surviving from the moment the infected thing bit into his flesh. The metaphysical changes alone that the subject had undergone in a matter of seconds were unprecedented, and now with its head blown half off, it would never reveal the secrets of what made it especially lethal to living humans.
Chambers, by the cruellest twist of fate, was also one of those few people, one of the tiny percentage of human beings that possessed a certain genetic trait which combined with the virus in a way that left them just as violent and ravenous, but still in possession of enough cognitive ability as to be truly, horrifyingly dangerous.
The addition of the serum to his body before he died simply accelerated the process and bonded with the original virus to create the freshest version of hell mankind could conjure.
All over the south west region of central England, there were almost five thousand like him, all spreading out with murderous intent and a newly unlocked ability to stalk and hunt their prey—living people—with renewed energy and lethality.
Chambers sat upright, tensed the muscles of his right forearm and snapped the tourniquet off his limb. Pulling at the heavy, cumbersome protective suit, he tore it away from himself with startling ease and turned his head to face professor Grewal.
Grewal had seen that look in his eye once before—had seen it just before the scientist had punched him in the face—only now the eyes weren’t light blue and on the verge of tears but jet black amid a sea of red lightning bolts running through the white sclera. It drove a cold dagger of terror into Grewal’s chest.
Before Grewal could move, Chambers’ hand shot out impossibly fast and gripped his neck so hard that his hands and arms went painfully numb instantly. He tried to speak, at least his mind formed the words but his mouth couldn’t respond, due to the pressure around his neck.
Chambers leaned forwards, sniffed him once as he growled low in his chest, then bit him on the cheek hard enough to scrape his front teeth down Grewal’s cheekbone before the burn of the fever started to take him.
Chambers dropped the other scientist, the two of them finding themselves once more on the same side, regardless of how they’d felt about one another. He set about hunting down the other living people. Impacts hit his body, but as none of them blew apart his skull, they barely slowed him as he leapt and climbed and tore at them; never stopping to eat but just dealing debilitating blows before his attention was caught by another living enemy.
“Okay, that was definitely a forty-five,” Dave Shepherd said to the other SEALs, who had all stopped their work to stare back up the hill at the building they had just come from. The answer to the statement came in the form of an explosive rattle of automatic fire which had to be from a squad gun. If that was being used inside a building, then the day had almost certainly gone to shit, Miller knew.
They began to ready their weapons again, stacking up and waiting for the word to advance back up the hill just as screams filled the black sky.
“No,” Miller said. “It’s loose, and that means an outbreak. You know our orders.”
They did.
Wordlessly, they climbed into the boat and pushed off, taking a compass bearing to direct them out to sea where they would find the naval flotilla and hope to be done with the scourge.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The men of the British Special Forces elite took their role seriously.
Acting as the cut-off between what was obviously some kind of viral testing facility hastily thrown together by the Americans in a secluded farm on the west coast of the island, and the rest of the population to their backs in the east. They had never officially been told that there were scientists there testing the sickness that caused the dead to become ambulatory and tear the flesh from others unthinkingly. However, their strict orders to destroy anything coming from that direction that didn’t give the correct codeword response to their challenge—with a heavy inference to shoot first if they weren’t speaking at all—made it clear that they were facing the potential of infected people seeking a way through them.
They had made a small town of tents in the lee of a raised hillock which sheltered them just a little from the harsh weather the island experienced. But since they’d all successfully completed SAS selection and training, and had all spent time living in harsh environments where the power of the elements alone might kill them, this hardship barely even registered as one.
They rotated their turns on the road barricade, just as they took turns sleeping and patrolling the impassable ground either side of the only stretch of flat ground which the road ran through. That road was covered by two interlocking firing arcs of belt-fed general purpose machine guns capable of destroying any vehicle moving towards the farm.
“I still don’t like it, Tip,” a trooper complained to the man beside him as he lit his cigarette and tucked both hands back under his armpits to leave the smoke dangling from between his lips as he spoke. “There was more bloody gunfire earlier, so the boys said.”
The man he spoke to sighed, as though bored of hearing the same arguments come from him. “There’s always gunfire from there. It’s the easiest way to kill one of them.”
“Well, I still
don’t like it.”
“What don’t you like, Ed?” corporal Tipuric asked trooper Jenkins.
“Well,” the man said, voice still muffled by the cigarette and his Welsh accent, “they could be doing all sorts of things down there, and we don’t know anything about it.”
“What are you worried about?” Tipuric snapped, the cold taking the edge off his usually long patience. “Expecting a BTR-Eighty to come plodding up the hill? Howay, man. Bloody cold’s got to your brain.”
“Well, if one does come up, it can bloody well have one of these bastards,” the reply came as one hand was taken from the warm armpit it resided in and tapped a dull, green tube standing vertically.
“Take more than one,” Tipuric answered absent-mindedly, annoyed with himself for even being drawn into the idle conversation. He was saved any further retort by a sharp sound from the darkness ahead of their position. Both men froze, hearing the sudden absence of low chatter from either side of their roadblock. For ten long seconds nobody said a word, waiting to see if the noise repeated itself. Tipuric didn’t move, other than to tighten his grip on the Colt rifle he cradled and run his thumb up towards the safety catch.
“Fox,” he said confidently. Before anyone could disagree, the sound came again, only much further to the left of where it had originally sounded, to give the impression that there were more than one of the animals out there. That sharp cry was answered by a low chorus of hisses in various tones.
Tipuric stood, flicking off the safety catch and pointing his rifle front as he shouted.
“Stand to! Stand to! Attack front!”
Muzzle flashes from the medium machine guns lit up the dark night, showing hideous snapshots of men and women wearing a mixture of camouflage uniforms and white coats, all smeared with dark patches of blood, approaching at a run up the slope towards them.
Behind them, a mortar was sent up to pop high over their heads where a small parachute deployed to gently lower the fired projectile back to earth as it burned brightly and provided illumination to the battlefield.
That illumination did not make them happy. Tipuric’s mind counted just over twenty, which wasn’t an insurmountable number by any stretch of the imagination for such well-trained and well-armed men, but something nagged at the back of his mind as he lined up heads between the iron sights of the rifle and clattered off bursts of fire.
He should have listened to that nagging doubt. If he had, they might have won. Might have survived. As it happened, the noises they had ignored had originated with two former people—one in a pale shirt with a missing finger and another wearing the uniform and insignia of a US army staff sergeant—who had flanked the roadblock from the impassable high ground to each side and fallen upon the men firing the GPMGs.
As the guns went silent in unison, Tipuric instinctively turned to his left and began triggering shots off at the shape of a crouching man in a once light blue shirt with the collar undone and the sleeves rolled up as though he was still working after a long day. The shape crouched further, like it was powering up, then leapt clear of the aim of his rifle like a human-sized grasshopper, which left the SAS man momentarily stunned. Spinning and searching for a target, he looked back at the trooper who had been beside him, in time to see the man’s boots fly through the air as his rifle flashed with automatic fire when his trigger finger spasmed. As trooper Jenkins sailed backwards out of their defensive position, one of the bullets he inadvertently and negligently fired ricocheted from something and thumped into Tipuric’s side with just enough force to punch its way an inch into his flesh. Immediately, the wound welled with hot blood and took his breath away, but he was instinctively certain nothing vital was hit. Staggering back to his feet, he hefted the rifle with the heavy attachment under the barrel for firing small grenades, only to find the space before him empty.
A feeling. A creeping sensation. A cellular knowledge made him turn around, as the absence of sound and wind from behind him told his brain that there was a person there.
Rotating his head slowly, he saw the shirted man standing with such horrible and unnerving stillness that his presence was the absolute portent of the violent end he always expected to meet in battle one day.
He had expected it by an Argentine bomb or bayonet in the Falklands and he had expected it from a sniper in an attic room in Derry or Belfast, but he never, not once, expected to die as he did on a freezing roadside on a Scottish island.
He began to raise the gun but it was knocked violently aside by an arm much stronger than his own. He retreated a step to whip the Browning pistol up and trigger two fast shots into the chest right where the heart was, in the classic double-tap he had trained to deliver for so many years.
The muscle-memory of the fatal shots—fatal in almost any other scenario—cost him his life. Had he acted less instinctively, had his brain pulled the trigger and not his subconscious, as he had trained his body to do, he might have aimed for the head and scored a lucky hit.
The two bullets did nothing. They didn’t even delay his death for a second as the hideous thing before him snatched a hand out and dug the fingernails of its right hand into the flesh above his collar bone, tearing through the three layers of clothing to break the skin and snap the bone as it dragged him towards its open mouth.
The last thing Tipuric saw, before he was blinded by the sheet of blood flowing from the bite to his head, was the bright reflection of the illuminating mortar in the black eyes of the thing that killed him.
Fisher, unable to sleep in his bed, went downstairs in the house he and the other CIA men had adopted as their own and sat in a threadbare, wing-backed chair that he guessed was older than he was. He poured himself something from a bottle bearing a name on the label he couldn’t pronounce and held it up to the small light that the lamp bulb emitted to bathe the room in a soft, dull yellow. The colour and clarity of the drink was to his liking, and he allowed himself the small fantasy that he was a connoisseur of such things before taking a hit of the drink and tossing it back without tasting it.
He coughed hard, spluttering as if the harsh whisky had fought back and insisted that he treat it with more respect than to just swallow it like it was prescribed medication, instead of something that took years to mature.
He wiped his eyes and stood to pour another, still coughing intermittently, and took a tentative sip this time. He allowed the drink to coat his mouth and burn his gums before taking a swallow and feeling the liquid pass down his throat to where it warmed his stomach and tempted him to take another sip.
When that glass was finished, he allowed himself another, arguing internally that he was unlikely to hear anything important until the morning when the tapes of the air bombardment and the reconnaissance fly-over were delivered to the carrier.
That footage would vindicate him, he was certain. It would show that the infected were made inert, were bleeding out to pose no threat to the lives of American servicemen who would be arriving by boat the following summer to begin cleansing the nation, ready for clean-up and repopulation.
After that, they would move into the European states that could be easily defended, and from there the pattern he had devised would be repeated. They would again use the devices to attract the infected into concentrated areas before destroying them with the anti-virus developed under his direction. This simple, and most importantly cost-effective, strategy he was sure would earn him an elevated position when the deck was shuffled, which it surely would be soon.
There were other states in the world still alive, still independent, but their survival was largely down to luck and geography, whereas the United States remained whole through strict quarantine procedures and a hard line of dedicated defence. He’d heard the scuttlebutt that so many ships had been sunk and so many aircraft shot out of the skies to prevent even the slightest chance that the virus would land on their home soil. All of those refugees who had followed procedure and been taken in would one day be repatriated to run what would effective
ly be a client state of their own administration.
He knew that if the boot were on the other foot, the Brits or the French would do precisely as they had done. He doubted the might hiding behind the Iron Curtain would have been much different, for that matter.
Fisher’s tumbling thoughts of the world’s politics and his own ambitions swirled in his head until, ironically, the sleep that eluded him in bed took him quickly as his head slumped against one of the high wings of the armchair.
A hammering noise woke him, reminding him of a jackhammer ripping up the road to make way for more roads, more cars, more people. The world had too many people in it already.
The hammering sounded again, reaching his brain fully this time and setting off the alarm bells. The bangs on the wooden door sounded as if the person on the other side were fleeing the very hounds of hell.
He woke with a gasp, the empty glass falling from his lap to land on the thick hearth rug with a heavy thump of the crystal tumbler’s base. A strangled noise escaped his throat as he stood, unsteady through tiredness more than the few glasses of scotch, and he made his way to the door to slide across the heavy bolt and admit a red-faced, terrified man in American military uniform.
“Sir!” he gasped, “We have to get the hell outta here!”
“Calm down, soldier,” Fisher ordered him. “What’s going on?”
“Outbreak,” the soldier panted, “at the lab.”
Fisher stared at him for a second with a blank expression on his face. He rejected the urges to ask if he was sure, or to state the idiotic belief that there had to be a mistake. He swallowed, nodded to himself, then turned to face up the stairs and bawl out that they were leaving. The other two agents had already been woken up by the banging and both appeared at the top of the stairs to exchange terrified glances with one another.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 20