As they trudged onward, both their minds replaying the horror they had just witnessed. Their heads swivelled from side to side, their eyes intently watching the woods for any movement. They passed over a thin brook that ran through a pipe, as it intersected their path. Then the track led them through a meagre line of trees that formed the perimeter between this and a new field that was much the same. The only difference was that the woods to their left were now, disconcertingly, only a few metres away.
If someone were hiding among those trees, Jenna worried, and they came running out at her, she would have only a second or two to react.
Off to their right and at a distance at the far edge of the field, there stood a huddle of horses, heads bowed low to the ground, either ignorant to, or unmoved by Muz and Jenna’s sudden arrival. It wasn’t the most pressing thought in either Muz or Jenna’s mind but they both found themselves briefly wondering what the animals were doing out here, wandering free. There must be a neighbouring private field nearby, the gate of which had been left insecure, Muz concluded.
He had been to several calls in the past, concerning both horses and cows loose in the streets. It was something friends of his, who worked in more central boroughs, found nothing short of hilarious.
In the miserable sky above them, with the absence of all other sound, they could hear the sound of helicopters. They managed to catch sight of one, through the canopy to their left. On its side, they were able to see the logo of a news network. As it scanned the ground beneath it for any areas of on-going violence, or any other striking newsworthy images, the helicopter came and passed directly over their heads.
Muz and Jenna jumped up and down, waving their arms around frantically. The pilot saw them and responded, moving in closer above them, until the downdraft from the rotors beat the grasses flat. As it hovered no more than fifty feet above them, it turned side on and they could see a cameraman leaning out the sliding side door and focusing a huge lens on them.
Thinking they were saved, the pair on the ground continued to jump up and down in exhilaration and relief. Jenna jumped on Muz, wrapping her arms around his neck and almost throttling him. But, as they watched, the cameraman gave a thumbs-up to the pilot. The helicopter then gained altitude again, banked away and was gone over the trees.
“Why didn’t they rescue us?” Jenna asked, after a minute of standing and staring up at the treetops, her bottom lip beginning to tremble.
“It’s not their job,” Muz responded with a cold, matter-of-fact manner that did not convey his anger.
Though the helicopter could have easily landed in this field, he should have known that it wouldn’t do so. The press never got involved in helping those caught up in the tragedies they were so eager to film.
He remembered how, it must have been a couple of years ago now, he had been at a protest in Parliament Square. The crowds of protesters had become violent, attacking the police cordon. In the overwhelming rush, he’d become briefly separated from the rest of the line and found himself knocked to the floor.
There had been several members of the press stood right next to him, who could have easily helped him to his feet. Instead, they had just continued to film, sticking the camera right in his face, as he got the kicking of his life. It had seemed like ages before his colleagues found him and dragged him to safety. After that, Farah had persuaded him to hand in his level two public order training ticket.
“Come on,” Muz said and they continued along in self-pitying silence.
Though her head hung despondently so she was looking at her feet, Jenna caught sight of movement in her peripheral vision. Her heart began to race, even before she had flicked her head up, to look over the field to her right. She needn’t have worried, she thought, as she saw it was just the horses. The huge but docile beasts had been disturbed by the helicopter, and on seeing the two humans that now shared their field, were ambling over to take a look.
Desperate to block out the pain in her stomach, the pictures in her mind of the two officers eating that child, and her general feelings of hopelessness and despair, Jenna made an effort to engage Muz in conversation.
“Do you live around here, Mustafa?” she asked.
“No,” he responded, resentful at being distracted from scrutinising the all too close treeline to their left, for both signs of danger and any clues as to where they currently were in relation to the surrounding roads.
Although some police officers were happy to live on the same borough as where they worked, it was not something he would ever do. The last thing he needed, when he was out shopping or down the pub with his wife, was to bump into some nutter he’d arrested.
“So where do you live?” Jenna tried again.
“Up the A1,” Muz told her.
He disliked the idea of any of the people he dealt with in his job even having a clue about where he lived, and this woman was no exception.
“Do you have any kids?” she then asked him.
“No,” Muz lied. “How about you?”
He wasn’t interested in the answer. He simply thought that if he gave her nothing to go on, regarding himself, and just threw the question back at her, she might chunter on for a while, without requiring any input from him.
“I have a boy,” Jenna replied sadly, “but I don’t get to see him. The bastards from Social Services took him away when he was two.”
The topic of conversation being focusing on her child brought up painful feelings for Jenna but still she preferred to talk about that than walk in silence and focus on her current problem.
“His name is Ben. He’ll be six now,” she went on.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Muz said, as he turned and looked at her now.
For the first time, and only for a moment, he saw her as an actual person, rather than just some skag head.
In turning to regard the woman, Muz now caught sight of the horses that were plodding towards them from the opposite direction to the one he had been scanning. The three animals did not look well at all. One had open, weeping sores along its left flank, while another had long tendrils of drool hanging from its chin.
They continued to draw nearer, two of the horses baring limping gaits. When they were close enough, Muz was able to see that the bald red patches in one animal’s side were not sores but actually open wounds. What he had thought to be saliva hanging from the mouth of another was maroon and clotting.
Injured legs aside, Muz had never seen horses move in this manner before. They trod towards Jenna and him with a slow deliberate stride, their eyes fixed on them and their heads hung menacingly low. They reminded him of large cats, lions or tigers, stalking their prey, getting as close to their victims as they could, before breaking into a life and death sprint.
“Jenna,” Muz whispered, trying to get her attention, as the cold touch of fear began to spread through him.
But Jenna wasn’t listening to him. She was transfixed by what she now saw over where the horses had initially been standing, when she had first seen them. The beasts had not been feeding on the grass there. Amid the grasses that were wet with something black-red in colour and thicker than mere dew, there lay a fourth horse and the body of a man.
The stricken horse lay on its back, its hind legs still kicking powerfully but ineffectively. The bare white fingers of its ribs could be seen amid the oozing mess of its open chest cavity.
The man, though there was not much left of him from the stomach down, his pelvis and legs no more than bone, had his upper body leaning deep into the horse’s chest. His head wedged in under the enormous ribcage, he was feasting heartily on the richest tasting of all flesh, the animal’s heart. His teeth sunk into the organ, bursting one of its chambers and releasing a torrent of still hot blood, which he drank greedily.
“Jenna,” Muz now growled as menacingly as he could muster.
Thankfully, his voice now caused her to snap out of her traumatised trance and she looked back at him with the eyes of a terrified child.
>
“Run,” he commanded her but the word had no effect. “Jenna. Fucking run.”
Jenna looked ahead of them now. The edge of the field they had been heading for was no more than thirty metres away but it might as well have been thirty miles, she thought. She broke into a wobbly sprint, her legs weak with fear beneath her.
Muz was at her side, easily matching her pace. He glanced back over his shoulder. Just as he had feared they would, the three horses, reacting to the sudden burst of speed from the two humans, broke into a hard gallop.
“Run faster,” Muz shouted. “Don’t look back.”
The normally placid, even timid animals were now just as mentally deranged and driven by a burning hunger as the humans Muz and Jenna had encountered were. They were riddled with the foreign amoeboid cells that were replicating throughout their bodies, resulting in rapid cell death. Consequently, the horses now required protein to rebuild their damaged tissue just as much as the affected humans did.
Normally exclusively herbivorous by nature, these horses now craved meat to sustain themselves. Although their natural diet of grass was high in proteins, it required a lot of time and energy to digest and release the nutrients. Their current need to rebuild their own dead tissue was so great however that only the readily available proteins in meat would suffice.
Muz and Jenna, running on only two ill-conditioned legs apiece, were no match for the powerful, sprinting beasts that bore down on them, and in no more than three or four seconds, the horses had caught them. Anticipating this, and in an act of either bravery or stupidity that surprised himself, Muz turned on his heels to face the huge, muscular animals. Waving his arms widely, shouting and wailing, he ran off to one side, drawing the horses away from Jenna.
“Keep running,” he called after her, and she did just that.
Just a few feet from the trees that bordered the field, Muz almost tripped over the bleached bare wood of a fallen branch. Just as one of the horses snapped at him, its lips peeled back over its flexing nostrils to reveal hideously large teeth, Muz stooped, avoiding being bitten.
In the same move, he picked up the branch and swung it at the nearest horse, smacking the animal hard around the side of its head. Unconcerned, the horse reared up onto its hind legs, preparing to trample Muz with the hooves of its front feet.
The copper leapt out of the way with an agility he didn’t know he had and swung at the next horse that was coming in to take a chunk out of him with its chomping incisors. This animal however caught the wielded branch in its teeth and ripped it easily from Muz’s grip.
With almost unbelievable good fortune, as far as Muz was concerned, the swinging tree limb caught the third horse in the eye though. One of the woody fingers wedged deep in the socket down the side of the eyeball and the beast actually screamed in pain. Half-blind, it staggered sideways and slammed its bodyweight into the rearing horse, causing them both to fall to the ground, momentarily blocking the third remaining horse from reaching Muz.
Knowing he would not get another, Muz took the opportunity and ran. The trees were directly in front of him and though the bushes between them were thick, he dove at them head first. He couldn’t have cared less about the pain of the branches smacking him in the face or the thorns ripping into his cheeks. On hands and knees, he scrambled forward as best he could, through the heavily interlaced branches.
The horses directly behind him tried to follow, desperate not to let their prey escape. They drove forward into the trees with all the power in their legs and each with the weight of about eight men behind them, splintering many of the branches. The treeline however, was just too thick for them to push through.
Tumbling out onto what appeared to be a road of sorts on the other side, Muz saw Jenna too had made it through and was currently on all fours, panting and retching with the unaccustomed exertion. Muz quickly got back to his feet and ran over to her, grabbing her by an arm and pulling her up.
“Pull yourself together,” he told her. “We need to keep moving.”
They could hear the horses still trying to force themselves through the trees, and knew that if the animals managed to break through, the two of them may not be so fortunate again.
Finding themselves on the sharp bend of a single track road, looking hastily in both directions, they could see nothing but dense hedge line.
“Which way?” Jenna asked, her voice empty and apathetic.
“This way,” Muz said, making a split second decision. “We should carry on heading in the same general direction we have been.”
He didn’t recognise the road and doubted that he had ever been down it before, despite the length of time he had been working on the borough. His job mainly entailed travelling at speed along the dual carriageways and other main routes, from one scummy estate to another. Winding, narrow roads like this were of little use in getting anywhere fast.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” he repeated over and over to himself, barely able to believe they had survived that unexpected attack and giddy with relief.
When their lungs could take no more and Muz was confident the horses were not following, he allowed them to slow once more to a walk. They again trudged heavily onward in silence, Jenna soon lagging behind, clutching at the pangs in her stomach. The copper set a hard pace nonetheless. He wasn’t feeling at his best either but they couldn’t afford to hang around, exposed in the open like this.
Now that he knew the spread of the madness was not limited to humans, he was painfully aware that the route he had chosen through the fields and away from the streets wasn’t necessarily as safe as he’d thought.
Those horses, he realised, must have been attacked by that man he had seen. Once affected by the dementia he had spread on to them, they had obviously turned on him and eaten his lower half, before then attacking the weakest of their own number, for its greater mass of meat.
Muz tried not to let his mind dwell on the horror of it and instead focused himself on the task ahead of getting back to the police station.
Chapter 4
Carl & Chuck
They didn’t see a single car on the whole stretch of this narrow track, and although Muz suspected that the road probably didn’t see much traffic travelling along it on a normal day, he had to wonder whether there was a single moving vehicle anywhere on the whole of this messed up borough.
The winding lane went on for longer than Muz thought it would, and he began to worry he had lost his baring completely. He was trying to keep the lazy bends they passed in his head, building a mental map of sorts, to estimate their general direction. With the presence of the sun hidden by the featureless grey sky and no landmarks to be seen through the dense trees, it was a hard task. He had a growing concern that the road was going to spit them out somewhere totally unexpected, somewhere close to where this all started, somewhere with lots of people staggering around, just waiting for a fresh kill like Muz and Jenna to unwittingly wander into their midst.
Eventually though, the lane brought them to a quiet T-junction with another road, a proper road this time with white markings and one lane in either direction. As the lane they had been following almost met the next, a metal gate barred the way. Overgrown and rusty, it didn’t look as though it had been opened in sometime. No wonder he hadn’t recognised the route then, Muz thought. The track was an unused private road.
Muz immediately identified the new road ahead as being the other end of Wise Lane, the very place he had been aiming for. An all too brief rush of self-satisfaction rose momentarily above his overwhelming fear and fatigue.
On just the other side of the lane there lay Mill Hill Park, a vast open green area. There wouldn’t be much in the way of cover but they would at least be able to see anyone coming for them from a long way off. The two of them still couldn’t be more than a mile from where this had all begun and they were still dangerously close to a lot of built up areas. Muz knew that the madness had at least spread as far as this; the images the TV had shown of the man bei
ng killed on Mill Hill Circus had come from the other side of this park. That was at the north end though and he planned to head south through the open fields.
Climbing over the gate, they carefully avoided the thorny branches of the brambles that had wrapped around the bars. Their thighs and calves were stinging enough from the scratches they had already received, in being so hasty to flee the cemetery and in escaping those nightmarish horses. Standing on Wise Lane, they saw immediately to their right there was a stone-walled and gated entrance to a very wealthy looking huge house. The place must have had at least eight bedrooms.
No more than twenty metres further along the road than this, they saw a white man in a suit slumped against a red Vauxhall Astra. The car had veered off the road and wrapped itself around a lamppost. Judging by the extent of the damage, it had been going at a serious speed before coming to such an abrupt stop.
The man had a phone in his hands, and in frustration with the device, he repeatedly bashed the thing against the roof of the car, before throwing it across the road. It was at that moment that he noticed Muz and Jenna’s presence.
The two regarded him warily, fearing he might attack them, as everyone and everything else seemed to be doing.
“Oh great,” the man sighed. “That’s all I need. Officer Job’s Worth is back.”
Muz recognised him now as being the man who had tried to get through his cordon point the day before. He had been annoying then and now he had already managed to piss him off again with the first words that had come out of his mouth.
“You wouldn’t take no for an answer then?” Muz said to him, walking over to where he was stood. “Happy with where it got you?”
“I beg your pardon, officer,” the man replied with an affected superior tone.
Muz looked back at the way the car had come and saw the black lines of weaving skid marks coming out of a sharp bend.
Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel Page 11
