“The Caribbean was a hot bed of skirmishes between the Europeans back in the day,” Smith said. “These islands were regularly changing hands between warring countries in those days.”
I stared at the tombstones for a few seconds. “I wonder if their families ever got to find out what happened to these guys.”
Smith shrugged. “They put them in the ground and gave them a decent burial and marked the graves with their names. I guess the families got to know how and where they died. Not everybody who gets whacked in a combat zone gets that privilege.”
“Tell me what it is like in a real combat zone, Smith?” I asked.
Smith glanced at me briefly and turned his gaze to the ground. “They’re not someplace you want to be, kid.” His eyes glazed over slightly and he looked as though his thoughts were taking him somewhere back in time. A place where he didn’t want to be. Maybe Smith was good at locking bad memories out of his mind, putting terrible recollections in a vault in the darkest place in his psyche.
Smith shook his head slightly and his usual, pissed off grimace reappeared. “Come on, let’s get out of this place. We got a job to do.”
We headed out of the bone yard, walking through the stones to the opposite side of the clearing. We moved through another wooded area and stopped when the land sloped downwards away from us, revealing an open field of tall grass. The field spread for around a mile and in the distance we saw a collection of whitewashed buildings constructed in a circle.
We looked left and saw the land rising up again towards the coast. The castle turrets were slightly visible behind a crop of tall palm trees. To our right, the cliff sloped back down inland, forming a huge V shape that disappeared amongst tall and heavy foliage.
“Do we head straight for the castle?” I asked.
Smith studied the landscape. “Sounds like a plan. We’ll go take a look-see at that castle and figure out what we’re up against. Try and keep behind cover and don’t go waving your arms around and flashing a big dumb grin if you see anybody. Chances are they
will
be hostile. If the sniper sees us coming, we’re toast, got it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know the drill, stay hidden.”
Smith duly nodded and turned to the left. I followed him, walking behind the tree line and up the slope. The castle was situated further away from us than I’d first anticipated. It only looked as though it was a few hundred yards away but turned out to be quite a trek. We continued up the rise and dodged between several thickets of trees and spiky gorse. Again, I felt sweaty and dehydrated and couldn’t wait to shed the rubber suit sticking uncomfortably to my body.
The sun started to dip but the temperature didn’t drop. The heat was humid and cloying, the kind that simply made you sweat, even if you weren’t wearing a stupid wetsuit. The Russians had obviously not invested in the neoprene material for their diving suits, a fabric that allows the skin to breathe beneath the outfit. We had no supplies and carried only basic underwater weapons and weren’t even dressed or equipped for a land assault. We must have looked like a right pair of goofballs.
Smith led the way through a clump of palm trees and we saw the vast, light brown stone wall of the side of the castle rising up from the ground in front of us. The tree line stood around twenty feet from the fortifications and we scanned the area for a possible access point. No entranceways or windows were situated along the wall, which spanned around the length of a football field, running straight to the cliff top and roughly forty feet high. The old building was impregnable from the side. The castle was constructed to keep out fully equipped armies so two complete jerks holding spears weren’t exactly going to cause a major security breach.
Smith glanced at me and shook his head. This was a no go. We moved to our right towards the rounded corner of the castle, where another separate battlement jutted out from the main structure. The palm trees thinned away to the edge of a rocky rim. Smith stopped moving and held out his arm across my chest to stop me advancing.
I stood still and Smith pointed downwards. The landscape dropped away in a sudden vertical plummet. We looked down the precipice and saw a dirt track leading to the castle’s main entrance, at least fifty feet below from where we stood.
I silently groaned at the scene beneath us. The dirt trail led to two large and firmly shut chunky wooden gates in the center of the front castle wall.
The sound from below was unmistakable. Wailing, shrieking, snorting and snarling. Around fifty undead clustered around the castle gates, banging, gnawing and scraping at the wooden fortifications. I knew they wouldn’t stop until they’d ripped those huge gates apart.
Chapter Fourteen
My stomach churned. This island was no safe haven. It was turning out to be another nightmare scenario in another land. Same shit, different place.
The world was totally fucked.
Wherever you went, it was the same old shit. Fight your way from one bad situation to another. Lurch from crisis to crisis and hope you weren’t the one to get tagged along the way. I felt like jabbing the damn spear I held in my hands right through my own head.
The muscles in my neck tightened as I gritted my teeth and I felt a rapid pulse in my head. I was prepared to accompany Smith in trying to take out the sniper but we were going to have to be some kind of supermen to even get inside the castle before the mission started.
I let the tension pass and almost laughed out loud at our absurd situation. We were going to have to leap fifty feet down a cliff face, take on a whole bunch of zombies with a couple of spears, smash our way through three hundred year old gates while being undetected and eliminate an unidentified number of highly armed and talented snipers with nothing more than our limited weapons. We had more chance of winning the now defunct State Lottery.
I leaned closer to Smith’s ear. “What the hell do we do now?” I whispered.
Smith also physically sagged at the scene below us. His shoulders slumped and he looked as dejected as I felt. I realized he’d expected a quick, easy fix to our problem.
“Ah, this ‘aint gonna be no walk in the park,” he sighed. “I figured it was going to be one guy holed up in that damn castle with all the front doors left wide open. This is something else.”
“No shit,” I rasped.
Smith rubbed the sweat from his forehead. “We’re going to have to backtrack, kid. Make our way to that village or whatever the hell it is.”
“And do what?” I hissed.
“Get our shit together. Get out of these damn rubber suits and see if we can find some better weapons. Maybe figure out where the hell we are.”
I sighed. I didn’t fancy trekking much further but we didn’t have much choice. We were stuck on this fucking island. The warship couldn’t move. We couldn’t bring people ashore, we couldn’t get back. What a mess.
I looked down on the ragged bodies of the undead, trying to break through the castle gates. They were grayed and cooked by the sun and their clothes were rotted and bleached of color. Most had dried brown blood surrounding various wounds around their bodies. I couldn’t tell if they were male or female, black or white.
“We sure as shit can’t stay here,” Smith confirmed.
We backed away from the cliff, returning to the tree line on the edge of the graveyard. We surveyed the landscape in front of us.
“We can’t head out across that grassland,” Smith said, pointing directly ahead of our position. “That route is way too exposed. Somebody on those castle battlements could see us for miles around and easily pick us off. We’ll have to head towards those trees and rocky terrain to the right.”
I felt deflated but knew Smith was right. We couldn’t take any other direction. My throat was still dry from vomiting and I ached all over. Another long barefoot trek was the last activity I wanted to do.
“Come on, let’s get going,” Smith sighed. “The sun will be down in around an hour and I want to be at that village before it gets dark. We don’t want to be hanging it out with no place to go when we can’t see nothing.”
We trudged slowly along the rear of the tree line, heading towards the dense forest running around the side and the back of the rising rock formation. As we moved down the sloping ground, I studied the tall trees and thick foliage in the distance and thought the landscape looked impassable. We’d somehow have to navigate our way through the bush.
I rubbed my hand through my hair as we walked and felt it was drenched with sweat. A cool shower and a couple of cold beers would have been glorious.
The ground flatted out at the edge of the next forest and I looked up at the giant rock above the treetops. There was certainly no way we’d ever reach that peak without the aid of climbing gear. Smith led the way, threading his way through the trees.
The tall trees shaded us from the dipping sun and Smith stopped walking to pull a handful of small green berries from a low hanging branch.
“What the hell are those?” I asked.
Smith held the berries to his nose and sniffed. He put one in his mouth and bit into it.
“I don’t know what the hell these things are but they taste good,” he said.
I picked a few myself and threw one in my mouth. It tasted incredibly sweet but the juice soon moistened my dry tongue and throat. I began shoveling two and three at a time into my mouth, savoring the syrupy taste.
“Hey, go easy, kid,” Smith warned. “They may taste good but we don’t know if they’ll give us a dose of the old bathroom blitz, know what I’m saying?”
I shrugged and dropped the remaining berries to the ground. Having a bad stomach and suffering a case of the runs wasn’t a good idea.
We continued onwards through the forest, the light diminishing by the minute. I doubted we were going to reach the village by sundown. Birds and other wildlife squawked and hooted and cawed in the trees and amongst the undergrowth. Insects buzzed around us, trying to feed on the sweat dripping from our heads.
Making any kind of headway was slow going and we were forced to change direction several times due to impenetrable scrub, fallen trees or the fact that we lost all sense of bearing. Eventually, as the sun started to dip below the horizon, the trees and bushes thinned and we moved out of the forest and across a patch of dry, dusty earth. The whitewashed village buildings stood a few hundred feet to the left of us.
I felt slightly relieved at the sight of those low standing dwellings but a little apprehensive at what or who we faced when we reached them.
Chapter Fifteen
An almost overgrown, narrow gravel road stood running horizontally before us, leading to the village in one direction and disappearing into the distance to the other. The road itself was peppered with potholes and weeds and grass sprouted in clumps at each side, running in a line through the center. Shallow ditches sat each side of the road, presumably to keep the rain water off the surface during the storms Caribbean islands were notorious for.
We kept to the left side of the road, walking on the grass between the gravel and the ditch. My feet already felt sore and raw and I didn’t want to step over sharp gravel chippings, tearing the skin of my soles to shreds. The damn grass felt spiky enough underfoot as it was.
I walked around three feet behind Smith, trying to stay focused and alert. The heat and lack of drinking water made concentration on anything almost impossible. Smith moved at a slower pace than his normal military type stride but I still had trouble keeping up with him.
The setting sun cast a red hue across the landscape and the scene would have been picturesque in normal circumstances.
I heard the grass rustling from somewhere low to my left and looked down. The ditch was a dark shadow. I caught sight of something moving, it looked like a snake. The silhouette moved up the bank of the ditch and I saw it was a human arm clad in a light colored garment. The fingers clawed at the grass and a head and torso lurched from the ditch into the crimson twilight. I jumped backwards onto the gravel road, gazing up and down the trench in front of me. More objects resembling human limbs squirmed and moved through the shadows.
“Smith,” I whispered. He was around twenty feet ahead of me now.
Smith stopped and turned, still oblivious to the writhing danger, only a couple of feet away. “What?”
“You might want to move away from that ditch, man,” I said quietly.
Smith turned forty-five degrees to his right and saw the mass of bodies clawing their way from the trench. He took a couple of backward paces to the center of the road and turned right around to study the opposite ditch.