The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 4) (12 page)

“Yeah, but we like you, so we prefer to piss
you
off. We don’t just go about upsetting
anyone
, you know. You should be flattered,” Bull offered.

“Yeah, and Stan said we need to do some weapon training with the civvies sometime this afternoon. They’re getting lazy, apparently,” Taff added.

“Oh yeah, that, too.”

“Why didn’t you just knock and tell me that?” Kyle growled, clenching his fists and feeling his anger begin to surge again.

Taff shrugged and glanced at Bull with a grin.

“We sent you an email.”

“Wanker,” Kyle roared, and in a flash he threw the ball at Taff, aiming for his head.

Taff was too slow to move out of the way, but managed to get his arms up as the ball reached him. It thwacked powerfully against his forearm like a hammer, and he let out a high-pitched yelp as the dull pain travelled up through his radius and ulnar bones.

“One of you can fix my window,” Kyle snarled, and turned away, headed back to his private retreat.

“Stan wants us all up on the bridge at fourteen-hundred,” Bull called after him.

Kyle stopped and turned around, realising that there had been a genuine reason after all for them putting so much effort into annoying him.

“What for?”

“Don’t ask me, mate. I only work here. Whatever
‘Julius Stanius Caesar’
wants he gets. We’re just his messenger boys these days.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?”

Bull looked across at Taff who was rubbing the spot on his forearm where the golf ball had struck him. It was already turning a deep blue colour, and the swelling was visible. Bull turned back to Kyle and shrugged.

“This way was more fun.”

The men were prompt. They arrived, as was the standard operating procedure, five minutes before the meeting was to begin. It was something that was engrained in all of them from their early days as recruits in the British Army. As boys still in their teens, they were hounded by their depot instructors over the smallest matter. Punctuality was always a major issue, and bad time keeping would always result in a period of extensive pain and suffering. Some of the team were already there, having arrived much earlier so that they could check on the radio communications to the mainland and, of course, reach the coffee and freshly baked biscuits before Bull arrived and snapped up the lot for himself.

The bridge was far from what would be expected on a modern ship. Although it had the same controls, radar systems, and communications equipment, much of it was out of action. The radar and radios still worked, but no one had any real knowledge of the engines and steerage controls. For years the ferry had sat at anchor, floating in the Irish Sea, and slowly rusting away. Despite their efforts, the salt water seemed to penetrate every surface, corroding the metal and slowly eating away at the ship. The ferry’s paintwork was steadily changing from clean white and blue to a dirty orange, and many began to wonder just how much longer they could keep the vessel afloat.

“Looks like that Orca Whale is back,” Steve mumbled as he looked out from the large windows fixed into the bridge.

The sun was getting lower and the sea was growing dark, but a hundred metres off the port-bow a large black fin could clearly be seen cutting through the choppy water. From time to time it would disappear beneath the waves, only to resurface a minute later and giving the men on board a view of its large, glistening back.

“It’s a Killer Whale, you bell-end,” Bull snorted, seeing the animal for himself as he joined Steve at the front of the bridge.

“Yeah, a Killer Whale
is
an Orca Whale,
bell-fucking-end
.”

“Who are you? David Attenborough?”

“No, I’m just someone who actually reads books rather than using them for a door-stop or toilet paper.”

Bull grinned at him. He liked Steve. The man was much younger than him, but over the years he had grown from being a boy in his late teens who was unsure of himself and with no combat experience, and into a soldier who could be depended upon. He had developed into a confident, intelligent, and aggressive man who was not afraid to stand up for himself or others. He was only of average height and build with a mop of mousy, blonde hair and bright blue eyes that were set into a face that looked much younger than his years, but his wit was sharp, and his courage unquestionable.

He had no real military background; only what he had learned over the past decade. Before the outbreak, he had been studying in college. When the dead began to rise, he found himself press ganged into the military and, eventually, as part of the submarine’s crew due to his limited knowledge of mechanics.

Steve knew that Bull was far brighter than himself. The man had a very high IQ, degrees, and a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of knowledge. However, the mighty Bull always went out of his way to come across as nothing more than a lump of muscle and brawn. Steve knew full well that Bull would have known that Orca and Killer Whales are the same animal, but it was just Bull’s way of interacting with people, and if he could get a bite along the way, he considered it as a bonus.

Stan entered through a door on the starboard side, closely followed by a middle aged man and woman who seemed to be concerned about something that Stan should address. They were the senior council members for the people aboard the ship, and it was their job to act as the primary link between the team and the rest of the survivors.

Early on, as the numbers began to grow, Stan was the man that everyone turned to for guidance and solutions to all problems, no matter how small. However, Stan was far from being the diplomatic sort, and after a while the politics on board began to resemble a dictatorship, with Stan’s primary focus being on the welfare of his own men and their continued survival. The petty problems that the survivors suffered and dealt with on a day to day basis did not interest him. They were unimportant to him, and his approach was less than understanding.

When Barry and Janet, a husband and wife couple who had served as city council members before the outbreak, suggested that they take up their old roles, Stan was happy to give them the reins. For years the system had worked perfectly. The men and women aboard would have meetings, discuss all matters, and Stan would be given a summary and consulted afterwards. The only time that he really intervened was when something affected the security of the ship or his men. He remained as the man in charge, but his influence was from afar and less overbearing for the sensitive civilians.

Barry was still talking when Stan had passed through the door. It was clearly something which he felt strongly about, but Stan’s body language betrayed the fact that he did not hold the same sentiment over the matter. He stopped and turned to the two councillors.

“All right,” he sighed. “I’ll see what I can do about it.”

“But this is important, Stan. I don’t know how much longer they will…” Barry protested, feeling that he was about to be dismissed and that he needed to press home his point.

Stan stared back at him, fixing him with his naturally cold stare, and prompting Barry to cease speaking. He looked back at the frightening veteran and began to shrink internally.

“Tell your people,” Stan said in a calm voice as his eyes bore into the councillor, “that we have bigger issues to deal with at the moment. The port generator is ready to die on us, we’re taking on more water than we should be, and don’t know why. The pumps are struggling to keep us afloat, and on top of that, winter is setting in, and we’re probably going to get the shit knocked out of us by storms again. You remember last year?”

Barry and Janet both nodded back to him, their faces dipped and appearing like children receiving a dressing down from their parents.

“Exactly,” Stan continued, fixing them with his unblinking eyes. “We only just stayed above water then. Tell your people to stop whining about the food, the library, the heating, or any other petty fucking thing. Get them to work on patching up this pile of rusting scrap, or there won’t be a ship to live on come spring. It’s your job to grip them, lead them, and make sure that they’re doing their bit. We’re not here to wipe their arses or hold their hands. Put them to work or
I
will.”

He turned away and allowed the door in the bulkhead to close behind him, leaving the two council members on the other side under no illusions that the conversation was over. Stan walked across towards the helm where everyone else was either seated or standing around idle and, waiting on him. He shook his head and ran his hand down over his face. At the beginning, when they had first began picking up survivors from the mainland, it had been pretty simple. The men and women brought on board were just happy that they had somewhere safe to live away from the infected. However, as the years grew, so did the gaps in their memories, and many began to forget that the world had changed and so had the priorities. Survival was everything now.

“Maybe we should start organising excursions to the coast for the civvies,” Taff suggested. “We could treat them as training exercises. Leave them there overnight, and then see who’s left in the morning. It would jog their memories about how shit it is out there, and how good they have it here.”

“It’s crossed my mind a few times, trust me.”

“So what’s the beef? Is something up?” Kyle asked. He was sitting on a high stool, leaning against the navigator’s table, and still brooding over his broken window.

“We’ve had word back from Charlie.”

Everyone turned, they’re attention now fixed completely on Stan. Charlie had been brought in with a group of survivors nine years earlier. He was an ex-soldier, having served most of his time in intelligence gathering units during the rough days in Northern Ireland. He was well into his sixties, tall and slender, but with an energy and enthusiasm that put a lot of the younger men to shame. He had a great ability for getting himself in and out of tricky situations, and some considered him a ‘trouble magnet’, but at the same time, he always seemed to successfully complete any job that was given to him.

He had proven his worth from the moment that the team had stumbled upon him. Stan and Bull had been out on a patrol to the mainland searching for a group who they had been receiving transmissions from but had since gone silent. They had found Charlie and the remains of his group living in a wood, having lost more than a hundred of their number when the farm complex that they had been living in was overrun. It was he who had kept the remnants together and alive, keeping them moving from one place to the next and searching for a new place to live. When Bull and Stan found them, they were weak and starving, close to collapse, and slowly dying. However, they could see that Charlie would never allow them to give up. They flocked around him as though he were some kind of post-apocalyptic messiah, turning to him for guidance and feeding off his energy and determination.

Within just a few hours of being aboard the ferry, Charlie was insisting that he go back and find any survivors from his group. His insistence was so strong that Stan and the team finally relented and set out with him. They returned almost a week later with fifteen more of his people that they had managed to round up.

The man had a natural ability to read the land, to think as an untrained survivor, judging what they would do and where they would go. It was not so much tracking, but being able to put himself into their shoes, filled with fear, panic, and desperation. That sort of empathy was something that Stan and his men lacked. They had always been soldiers, and so could not think as civilians. Although Taff could track anyone to any destination, there always needed to be a starting point. As tacticians, the soldiers could not always judge how the civilians would behave. The untrained men and women had no training, and their reactions were not always thought through with military logic when being attacked by the dead. The average man or woman did not think about the lay of the land, what their next move would be, or how to use the ground and environment to their advantage. They tended to be running for their lives with no long term plan.

Charlie had the ability to always know where that starting point would be. As a result, he and his small section always volunteered to carry out the missions to the mainland when searching for missing survivors.

A few weeks earlier when the radio messages that they had been receiving from a particular group had suddenly stopped, Charlie and his small group of infiltration specialists were keen to go and investigate why.

“Well?” Taff asked. “How’s things looking over there?”

“According to old Charlie, not good. There’s still no comms with the people inside, and from what he was telling me in the morning sit-rep, it’s getting pretty grim. There are ‘millions’ of the dead there, apparently.”

“So why doesn’t he just turn around and come back?” Kyle asked, wondering why they were even discussing the matter.

“Is that what you think they should do?” Stan replied, sitting back on his chair and interlocking his fingers over his lower abdomen. “I’ll call an ‘end-ex’ if you like. If that’s what everyone agrees on, it’s what we’ll do.”

“You were just as keen to help them out as the rest of us at the beginning,” Taff grunted to Kyle. “Now you’re changing your mind?”

“Absolutely,” the veteran nodded back. “If it was just a case of going in there, helping them out a little, and then leading them back here, I’d be up for it. But now it’s looking more like they’re fucked, and we’ll be getting fucked in the process if we go off to be heroes which I know is where this little meeting is leading us to.”