fifteen of them; drawn toward the shrieking engine. Oblivious to anything else ; guided missiles made flesh.
“Do it quietly!” Mouse had hollered over the fading roar of the engine, sliding the door back and charging out of the chopper, unsheathing his sword. The weapons had seemed ridiculous to John, and he hadn’t been alone in thinking so, but their usefulness quickly became apparent. The damn creatures weren’t deterred in the slightest by weapons, couldn’t even see them. Knives would have allowed them to get too close. Knives meant death or infection. Guns were noisy, and would bring more of them down upon you until the bullets ran out. The length of the swords - and their silence - gave the team a chance.
They were clumsy with the weapons, untrained and faintly ridiculous, but they were effective, the mindless horrors running straight into the wide arcs of swinging steel, their deaths a chorus of whispers cut into the air and dull, wet thuds. Barely loud enough to hear above the wind, silent enough to ensure they drew no further attention once the chopper engine hum had died away into the night.
The chopper ri de had been full of talk about zombies, about the walking dead. The man who had sent the team to St. Davids had promised they weren’t dealing with reanimated corpses here. There was nothing supernatural about the mission.
Staring at the fallen bodies, John had known the intel had been correct. These things died in exactly the same manner any human cleaved in two by a sword would die: messily, instantly. They weren’t reanimated corpses. They were humans, and the difference was all the more unsettling. What the hell was John a part of? What had these men, these rich bastards wielding science like a weapon, done? To reduce a human being into a blind, shrieking predator, willing to impale itself on the point of a sword to get closer to its prey?
John drove the point of his weapon into the neck of a twitching shape at his feet, a middle-aged woman wearing a homely beige cardigan. One of her feet was bare, the other still locked snugly inside a bloody slipper. As her movement ceased, and the field was finally still, he found himself wondering about her. Somebody’s mother, granny maybe. Probably home baking or watching quiz shows or gardening at one moment, a remorseless killer the next. Christ .
“Pussy!”
The Captain’s voice; raised a few degrees above room temperature. John shook away the thoughts and returned to the present.
“Move out.”
John measured out a gap of five metres or so from his nearest two colleagues, and began to advance, stepping carefully around the chunks of gore that littered the ground.
The ‘search’ was laughably short, barely ten feet of progress into the trees made. John knew, as soon as he heard the distinctive snick five metres to his left, how woefully underprepared they really were, how all their weapons and all their training had been rendered useless by a situation they never had a chance of controlling.
In the split second following the snick John had time to hear Panda cry “Shi-“ before his voice was lost in the deafening roar of the landmine erupting up through his body and the accompanying blinding flash that took a grisly snapshot of the forest around them.
Fractions later, the concussive blast ploughed into John, an invisible juggernaut that lifted him off his feet and deposited him in darkness.
*
To most men it would probably have been remembered as the night they took on a pair of knife-wielding thugs with their bare hands. To John it was simply the night he met her . When he got a chance to look back, he realised it was that chance meeting that started it all.
Six months back in the country he had been protecting for the best part of a decade, and John found him self sleeping in an old friend’s garage, working for a pittance as a bike messenger, darting through the streets of London carrying paperwork from one businessman to
“Do it quietly!” Mouse had hollered over the fading roar of the engine, sliding the door back and charging out of the chopper, unsheathing his sword. The weapons had seemed ridiculous to John, and he hadn’t been alone in thinking so, but their usefulness quickly became apparent. The damn creatures weren’t deterred in the slightest by weapons, couldn’t even see them. Knives would have allowed them to get too close. Knives meant death or infection. Guns were noisy, and would bring more of them down upon you until the bullets ran out. The length of the swords - and their silence - gave the team a chance.
They were clumsy with the weapons, untrained and faintly ridiculous, but they were effective, the mindless horrors running straight into the wide arcs of swinging steel, their deaths a chorus of whispers cut into the air and dull, wet thuds. Barely loud enough to hear above the wind, silent enough to ensure they drew no further attention once the chopper engine hum had died away into the night.
The chopper ri de had been full of talk about zombies, about the walking dead. The man who had sent the team to St. Davids had promised they weren’t dealing with reanimated corpses here. There was nothing supernatural about the mission.
Staring at the fallen bodies, John had known the intel had been correct. These things died in exactly the same manner any human cleaved in two by a sword would die: messily, instantly. They weren’t reanimated corpses. They were humans, and the difference was all the more unsettling. What the hell was John a part of? What had these men, these rich bastards wielding science like a weapon, done? To reduce a human being into a blind, shrieking predator, willing to impale itself on the point of a sword to get closer to its prey?
John drove the point of his weapon into the neck of a twitching shape at his feet, a middle-aged woman wearing a homely beige cardigan. One of her feet was bare, the other still locked snugly inside a bloody slipper. As her movement ceased, and the field was finally still, he found himself wondering about her. Somebody’s mother, granny maybe. Probably home baking or watching quiz shows or gardening at one moment, a remorseless killer the next. Christ .
“Pussy!”
The Captain’s voice; raised a few degrees above room temperature. John shook away the thoughts and returned to the present.
“Move out.”
John measured out a gap of five metres or so from his nearest two colleagues, and began to advance, stepping carefully around the chunks of gore that littered the ground.
The ‘search’ was laughably short, barely ten feet of progress into the trees made. John knew, as soon as he heard the distinctive snick five metres to his left, how woefully underprepared they really were, how all their weapons and all their training had been rendered useless by a situation they never had a chance of controlling.
In the split second following the snick John had time to hear Panda cry “Shi-“ before his voice was lost in the deafening roar of the landmine erupting up through his body and the accompanying blinding flash that took a grisly snapshot of the forest around them.
Fractions later, the concussive blast ploughed into John, an invisible juggernaut that lifted him off his feet and deposited him in darkness.
*
To most men it would probably have been remembered as the night they took on a pair of knife-wielding thugs with their bare hands. To John it was simply the night he met her . When he got a chance to look back, he realised it was that chance meeting that started it all.
Six months back in the country he had been protecting for the best part of a decade, and John found him self sleeping in an old friend’s garage, working for a pittance as a bike messenger, darting through the streets of London carrying paperwork from one businessman to
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