by Dave Jeffery
What happened next took mere moments, but was destined to feel as though it was an eternity.
***
Shipman’s Jackal mounted a curb to avoid an Evening Mail delivery van overturned with one of its back door slapped against the tarmac. Several paper blocks were strewn across the street, turning to grey pulp under the fine rain.
Connors pulled the car back onto the road once he’d navigated the obstacle, and wiped his visor to aid his vision. Through the watery smears he noticed a slash of colour on the horizon; a disparate red and blue swathe that appeared to oscillate as he watched it stream through the streets ahead.
And he wasn’t the only one to have seen it.
“Pull up, Connors!” Keene cried out over his shoulder, causing the driver to hit the brakes hard. The Jackal skittered on the wet tarmac for several metres before coming to a halt, and from their seats, Alpha Team watched the event unfolding before them in disbelief.
Three hundred metres away, a river of red and blue poured through the narrow streets. Shipman could see people in blue and white tunics, others in claret and blue; the colours of Birmingham City and Aston Villa football clubs; milling together in their thousands, in life staunch rivals yet in death drifting through the wet streets as one shuffling brainless mass; scarves hanging limp, hats off kilter, eyes filled with nothingness. Their ambling feet came as an incessant hiss; competing easily with the rain’s downpour and the ever present, woeful moans had replaced passionate soccer chants.
“Shit! It’s derby night!” Keene said astounded. “Blues versus the Villains.”
“Wonder who won?” Honeyman said with a grim smile.
“Not us, that’s for sure,” Connors said. “They’ve just cut us off. We need to find another route.”
“Shit!” Shipman whispered.
***
It was raining the night that Captain Joseph Wiggets shot Jasna Maric. He watched her bleeding to death in the mud of a small village 10 kilometers from Sarajevo, while the street dogs sat waiting for her to die. She was seventeen and had threatened to report his unwanted advances. So he shot her like a rabid animal. And then he took her out into a water logged field, placed a soviet-made Makarov pistol in her hand and reported her as a Serbian Croat traitor who had tried to kill him.
But unknown to Wiggets there was a witness. There was Stu Kunaka.
O’Connell had been out on patrol, a six hour stint, checking perimeters and making sure they weren’t being probed by Croat forces. They shouldn’t have been there, it was meant to be a discretionary operation.
Once he’d got back the village, O’Connell had sought out Kunaka. He found the big black guy sitting in his room, staring out into space, and the look he held was one of disbelief and despair, one of not knowing what to do.
“What’s up big guy?” O’Connell had asked. And Kunaka had told him what he’d seen.
“You have to report it,” he told Kunaka. “Covert or not, it’s an illegal shooting.”
“It’s his word against mine, man,” Kunaka muttered, O’Connell sensing the hopelessness in his friend’s voice.
“A fuckin’ squaddies word against a Sandhurst officer. A protected officer at that! Who do you think they’ll believe?”
Sadly, O’Connell knew the truth of these words. It was slim pickings no matter how they looked at it. Kunaka would either have to say nothing and live with it, or report the incident and pay the price of an unsubstantiated claim. And riling Wiggets for a second time.
It was at this point that O’Connell made the decision that would so spectacularly back fire that both he and Kunaka would be leaving the army with a red “DD” stamped on the cover of their buff military file.
“How about if we even the odds?” he suggested to Kunaka.
“What do you mean?” his friend replied hopefully.
“What if it were the word of two squaddies against one Sandhurst officer?”
“You mean lie?”
“Just say I was there too and saw it all.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Kunaka said.
“And you can live with it? Saying nothing?”
Kunaka had turned away from him then, the troubled expression, that look of crippling helplessness and confusion, setting up camp and appearing as though it planned to stay for a while.
If O’Connell had allowed it to do so.
***
And this was the expression that O’Connell saw on his friend’s face as he sat in the Mastiff; staring out as a hundred hungry zombies gawped back at him.
“Stu?” O’Connell said.
Kunaka didn’t respond.
O’Connell grabbed the big man’s shoulder, shaking it so hard O’Connell could hear his friend’s teeth chatter.
“Kunaka!” he said sternly. “Get back in the zone! We're in trouble!”
“Grandpa Joe?” Kunaka asked the wind shield.
“No, Stu, it’s me: O’Connell! And I need you back here with us, now!”
Kunaka turned to him, his eyes wide but dull. “They’ve come for me, O’Connell. Just like the Bokor said they would. It’s Judgment Day. It’s time to repent.”
“You repent on your own time, marine!” O’Connell snapped. “You’re getting twenty-five million for this gig. Now fucking drive this truck or let me do it!”
At the sound of his words Kunaka blinked his way out of his fugue. His eyes had some of their sparkle, but they were some way off returning to the light.
Just as O’Connell felt as though Kunaka wasn’t moving, one hand found the wheel and the other the gear shift. Then Kunaka revved the mighty engine.
“Suzie! Amir! Get below, we’re moving out!'
“You mean that dip-shit has finished scratching his ass?” Suzie said caustically in his ear. “Hope it was worth it!”
“Just get in, sister,” Kunaka growled. “I’m moving in ten seconds.”
“I’m surprised you can count that high,” Suzie griped. There was one more gunshot and then the sound of the hatch slamming shut.
“Okay, we’re in!”
“Get us out of here,” O’Connell ordered and the Mastiff powered forward, the row of zombies disappearing from sight, dragged under by the sheer force of its movement. The revving engine covered the hideous sound of bodies rupturing under its twenty-three thousand five hundred kilogram chassis, but the wheels still slipped on the carnage splashed upon the tarmac.
Within seconds they were free, O’Connell taking a second to peer into his side mirror through the hole in his window. He watched the crowd of zombies recede and wondered what Kunaka had meant by “repent”.
Then the moment was gone and his mind was back on the job.
“Take the next left,” he instructed. “Our target is at the bottom of the street.”
The Mastiff turned into a quiet side road flanked by a row of offices for a few hundred yards. This then yielded to small plaza on the right leading to a large, unassuming brown building. The plaza was quiet and the windows looking down upon the cobbled square were dark.
“Park right outside, Stu,” O’Connell said, holding onto the dash as the truck’s suspension bounced up the curb and raced over the series of heavy cobble stones.
As Kunaka pulled up, they both noticed that, as with the windows on the upper floors, the entrance foyer was in total darkness.
Then they saw something else, something that thrilled and chilled their hearts in equal measure. The doors to the foyer were no longer sitting in their frames. They were instead lying on the steps leading up to the building, ripped off of their hinges and discarded.
“They’re inside here too?” Kunaka whispered.
“Maybe,” O’Connell replied. “But either way we have to go in. Are you with us?”
Kunaka nodded. “Yes, boss, I’m here.”
“Then let’s be bad guys,” O’Connell said, opening the door.
***
“Time for you to do something other than whine and play chicken, Clarke,” Su
zie said as she felt the truck roll to a stop.
Clarke eyed her with contempt, unwilling to be drawn. In reality he was grossly intimidated by both her beauty and her forthrightness. Such qualities he often associated with cerebral paralysis whenever he spoke with the opposite sex. As such he avoided it as often as he could, preferring to mix with safer, less confrontational company.
Computers, for instance.
His penchant for hardware and soft ware had come early, his natural intellectual prowess nurtured by his parents - respectable, middle class people; teachers at two highly respected private schools in the Midlands, and totally neurotic to boot. The Clarke’s kept their only child so close to them they became complacent and missed a lot of the little nuances in his personality. How he grew very bored very easily, for example, or how he staved off ennui by sitting at his laptop apparently immersed in a school project, when all along he was dismantling the software, just seeing how it all worked. And then putting it back together. Making it work better. Faster.
Then the boredom crept in and Gaz Clarke sought out far more thrilling ways to fend it off.
He’d started small, hacking into school websites, planting spoof information on people who pissed him off, the bullies - brain dead pupils and sadistic teachers - and creating simple viruses that paralysed the system during SATS weeks and GCSE results times, watching the aftermath with a pervasive sense of power. From there, Clarke became more inventive, more adventurous. At seventeen he hacked into several bank accounts, just to see if it could be done. When he was eighteen he’d found a window in the FBI data base, using his Universities IPS address, landing the whole faculty system in hot water. And it was this issue of systems that could detect instances of hacking that encouraged him to design the Programme he would be uploading today. He called it the Mimic virus. Its premise was simple though its design was the result of three years of intensive research and programming. Now it was complete it would form the basis of a multi-million pound franchise.
So, sure, he felt isolated growing up and his retreat into his cyber-shell had done little to improve his social skills with girls, but he had plan, an end game and it was drawing near. By the time he walked away from this job he would be able to have any tight butted, big breasted bikini clad woman he chose because money was power and he would have more than he could spend.
They’d called him a geek at school. Soon he’d be a geek with a fuckin’ Ferrari.
Suckers.
“Will you move your ass?” Suzie was beyond impatient now.
“I’m getting in the zone,” Clarke said grumpily. “And you’re not helping.”
“Not helping?” she spat incredulously. “No. Not helping is cutting three people loose while you skulk down here like a scared rabbit.”
“This job isn’t happening without me,” he replied to the floor. His embarrassment was exposed by the mottled red rash creeping up his neck. “You’d do well to remember that.”
Suzie said nothing for a few seconds. It was a token victory that left Clarke with a glimmer of pride.
“Well, it looks as though you do have a pair of balls after all,” she said. “Now you just have to prove that you know what to do with them.”
“Suzie? Over,” O’Connell said in her headset.
“Go ahead, O’Connell.”
“Our target has been breached. We could have hostiles inside. We’ll be proceeding with caution.”
“Don’t we always?” she quipped. “See you in two. Over and out.”
Amir snapped several cartridges into the Benelli and nodded to the redundant SA80 lying at Clarke's feet.
“You’re going to need that,” he said.
12
Tom Everett's senses were in free fall.
He could feel the blistering heat at his back, blasting him forwards as the wind from the shattered windows of his apartment rushed towards the low pressure of the corridor outside. He could hear the whoosh and crackle of the flames, the splintering and spitting of timber and glass under intense heat, merging together with the awful groans from the doorway and forming one chaotic cacophony as the taste of the fumes filled his mouth but still finding room for a scream as he saw the things barring his exit.
Time stalled, making the event seem even more surreal, even more perverse; slowed down to the point where every detail was painted upon his memory, despite the primordial drive to survive the inferno crisping the hairs on his neck.
There were three people. Two of them, a man and a woman in their late fifties, were naked, the man’s belly hanging down over shriveled genitals, the woman’s nipples pointing at her knees, a web of silver stretch mark traversing her ample thighs. He recognised the other as the security guard from the foyer - Dennis, or something like that - but the last time Thom saw him, Dennis what’s-his-face didn’t have a purple tongue lolling from his mouth like a dog locked in a car on a warm day, nor did he have eyes that were at the same time so very blank yet so very intent. Some part of Thom’s mind noted the shredded duct tape at the guard’s ankles as he balled himself and hit the guy hard, taking the legs from under him, toppling Dennis what’s-his-name into the apartment, and towards the fire ball that wanted to be free so very badly.
The guard didn’t cry out, didn’t writhe in agony, instead he climbed to his feet, his skin frying and falling onto the floor as a stream of flaming fat.
The naked man and woman stood gawping at Thom’s prone body, lying flat to the floor as the flames expunged the apartment, washing over the corridor’s ceiling. The woman’s hair caught fire, turning the top of her head into a fiery crown, her features melting, collapsing like a cheap wax work, sizzling grease bubbling out her mouth and down her chin.
Then, to add to the macabre horror, her naked partner continued to stare down at Thom, and raised its arm, as if reaching out, and his hand balled before extending an index finger.
Then the inferno consumed it, leaving Thom with the bizarre image of a naked male zombie, sheathed in guzzling flame, its hand still pointing at him; and amid all this danger, amid all of this violence, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow being accused, held accountable in some way for Whittington’s atrocity.
Then the figures were nothing more than shambling shadows, collapsing as the intense heat shriveled muscle and sinew, and pulverized bones.
Thom’s perverse awe dissolved with the decimation of the zombies. Self preservation finally got through and he moved, keeping low, dragging in the meager oxygen still available in corridor’s confines and headed away from the heat and the horror.
The elevator to his floor lay to his left, but he ignored it. Somewhere from deep inside he recalled that it was a bad thing to try and use an elevator to escape from a high rise fire. It was the kind of thing that turned people into Pork Scratchings. The stairs weren’t much further, a set of heavy fire doors (how apt) leading onto a landing with carpets so deep and crimson it was clear that they were hardly ever used.
But once he’d shoved through these doors, Thom Everett did not run headlong down the stairs; he didn’t punch the air and claim victory over fate. He placed his back against one of the walls, sliding down until he was sitting, tears streaming down his soot stained cheeks and thanking any deity in the theological catalogue of Man that he was still very much alive.
***
Villa Park football Stadium has capacity for just under forty-three thousand people. When Dr Richard Whittington unwittingly released his kind of Armageddon upon the city of Birmingham, the stadium had been full. Within half an hour, silence had befallen the game, as people succumbed to a hideous, suffocating death, only to find an eternal limbo only forty minutes later.
Now, as one huge mass, the crowd sought out the corporeal to sate their endless, soulless hunger. And as they drifted through the suburbs of England’s second city, the tide rolled into Broad Street like a horde of Saturday night revelers with their own unique agenda.
And, through the view finder of his army issue
binoculars, Major Shipman watched them come.
“We haven’t got the time to find an alternative route,” he said to Connors after some consideration. “Give me more options.”
Keene pulled up a map on his PDA and then entered their co-ordinates. Within a few moments a 2D image of Birmingham City Centre filled the screen. Keene zoomed into a section where a red dot winked rapidly. As he honed down to the red dot it turned into a green arrow pointing North West.
“We’re two blocks short - half a mile maximum. We can assume that the streets from this point to our target will be blocked with hostiles,” Keene speculated. “Most routes will dissect these infected zones so our options are narrowed to either a call for a tactical air lift to our target or find a way on foot.”
“There’s no opportunity for an airlift anytime soon,” Shipman replied. “And it’s pretty conclusive that the city is overrun; which means it will only be a matter of time before the hostiles start to test our perimeters. Time is running out, gentlemen - I need answers.”
“What about below ground?” Keene offered. “We could use the sewers with guidance from COM.”
“Good work, Keene,” Shipman said. “Contact Colonel Carpenter and get him to send us schematic data on the sewer network. And tell him to do it quickly.”
As Keene got in touch with COM Shipman watched the approaching wall of football shirts, his face impassive.
“Get all the weaponry we can carry,” he ordered.
***
O’Connell and his team congregated briefly behind the Mastiff. Kunaka was back with them; but O’Connell knew his friend well enough to recognise that he hadn’t quite made the journey back from the dark place he’d visited for a while.
Suzie could see O’Connell’s concern for Kunaka and swallowed both her vitriol and the familiar stab of jealousy that often occurred when she saw her lover’s commitment to the big man.
