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"I’m not fucking throwing it at you! Get over here and help me with it!" This had almost become their ritual every time they had to go over a wall. Ozzy struggled out of the ageing Clansman radio’s straps and glared at his companion. A lover of heavy metal all things technical, the radioman was almost nothing like his more famous namesake. A geeky young engineering student from Birmingham, he’d somehow survived six months in the infantry and transferred to Signals in the hope of a more quiet life in the refugee camps up north. Then they sent him to the Scouts and partnered him with a drunken Frenchman. Now he was understandably furious about everything.

The last three then clambered over. Willow, Tony and the new boy. Apparently he was called Tim. The others kept away from the kid, as if his vulnerability was contagious. The gangly teenager struggled with the squad’s Bren light machine gun. It was a World War Two relic, loaded with newly manufactured blunt nosed crippler rounds. If they got surrounded by zeds in large enough numbers, they’d fire it at knee height and cut their way out. Under his thin camouflage smock, the red tunic collar of the teenager’s infantry uniform stuck out like a sore thumb. When the army first pulled back to Scotland during the Rising, they had to reintroduce conscription to make up for the losses. After the clashing mix of surplus gear ran out in the first few months of the war, cheap red cotton tunics became the uniform for the new British army. Faced with an enemy that didn’t shoot back, they had switched back to Napoleonic tactics. Everyone in the squad had survived being a redcoat for six months before they earned the right to not have to wear the stupid things. They were Scouts. Originally, the Scouts had been set up as something of an elite. Their job was to find the enemy and lure them back to the massed lines of the infantry. But the war was slowing down now. It was always like this between offensives, when they had to wait for more ammunition to be made up north. Now their job was to make regular sweeps of the countryside around a newly liberated American base. It kept them out of trouble.

The job was borderline suicidal. But the allure of extra pay and first choice on weapons and loot provided them with a steady steam of increasingly useless volunteers, along with plenty of rejects from other units. Transfer to the Scouts was a constant threat levied by bullying officers. Whenever the war got hot it was virtually a death sentence.

  Ozzy sat down on the damp grass and pulled on his headset. "How many’d we get then?"

"Seventeen." Anna called back, not looking up from the body she was dragging towards the rapidly growing corpse pile.

Dan dug into his smock pocket for Sergeant Marshal’s old diary. The pages were brown and stiff with his blood. The guilt came again. "Yeah, that’s right. Best let them know we’re all right." The words sounded hollow and pointless, said just to maintain the illusion of control. Once again, he hated Marshal for naming him as his successor. They barely even needed a leader. They’d been doing this job enough times for everyone to do it in their sleep. The kid put the Bren gun down on the grass with exaggerated care, obviously terrified of the weapon. Dan sighed. "Tony?"

Tony swaggered over and dumped his pack. He looked ridiculous. He’d managed to trade in his rifle for a Winchester pump action shotgun when they liberated the American base at Menwith Hill a couple of months ago. He’d wrapped a pair of bandoliers full of shells across his chest, making him look like a skinny Rambo. Even worse, he’d even started to wear a pair of reflective aviator sunglasses instead of his spectacles. An enormous nickel plated revolver strapped to his thigh bobbed up and down as he walked.  Dan needed to talk to him about that at some point. "What’s the matter chief?"  Over the past few weeks, Tony had affected a gruff, action hero voice in an attempt to cover up his whining Liverpool accent. He was playing the war game. They all did it to some extent, except maybe Anna. To make the reality of the situation less dreary, they often acted as if they were living in one of the Vietnam War films they consumed back behind the lines. They talked about "zips in the wire" and called zeds "gooks" or "Charlie." Hell, they even put packets of Marlboro Reds in their helmet bands and wrote on their flack jackets. Once, when the war got hot, they lured a swarm out of York with "Ride of the Valkyries" blaring out of a set of speakers mounted on a Land Rover. That had been pretty spectacular.

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