Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel

by James Carlson

  “You know that’s not the issue,” the fat man replied, glaring at the officer.

  “We’ll help you through,” Jenna said.

  “I don’t need help,” Chakamunda said miserably, dropping to his hands and knees and feeding himself through the gap.

  As suspected, at the point where his stomach pushed under the fence, he got wedged in and no amount of scrambling with his hands and feet could cause him to budge another inch.

  “Can’t… breathe,” he gasped, the bottoms of the metal uprights jabbed firmly into his belly.

  Muz and Carl grabbed an arm each, while Jenna took hold of the collar of his shirt, and together they began to tug him through.

  “Get the… f… off… m..,” the trapped man tried to shout but the pain of the burred metal dragging against his gut cut off his words.

  With a final dramatic yank, his girth slid free of the fence and his three helpers fell backwards into the gravel that lay beside the train tracks. Passing a hand through the tattered rips in his shirt, the black man nursed the raw and bloody scrapes running down his gut and muttered profanities under his breath.

  “I wasn’t always this out of shape,” he moaned, in lieu of a thank you, while coughing uncontrollably and getting to his feet. “Used to be able to keep up with the best of them. Most people call me Chuck, by the way.”

  “Chuck? Now that I can manage,” Carl replied with another broad grin. In this miserable situation, he was taking every pleasure he could get from not having to be the politically correct drone that corporate policy insisted on. “So, what do you know about zombies?”

  “What? Oh, so because I’m black I know all about zombies,” Chuck replied, immediately flying off the handle.

  “What? What’s you being black got to do with it?” Carl asked, genuinely confused by the man’s sudden indignation.

  “Zombies. Voodoo. Black,” Chuck spat back.

  “Hey, it’s you who’s been using the ‘Z’ word,” Carl said defensively. “I thought you might know something we don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “What about films?” Carl asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you remember anything about zombies from films?” Carl clarified. “You must have seen a few zombie films in your time.”

  “Is this guy serious?” Chuck asked, turning to Muz. “This is real, not some stupid fucking film. Fucking idiot.”

  “I was only asking,” Carl replied.

  Chuck kissed his teeth in disgust at the man and turned to walk along the train tracks. Muz shook his head at Carl, and then he and Jenna too headed off down the lines.

  “What?” Carl protested sulkily, walking behind them.

  The loose scree made walking without slipping difficult for Carl in his hard-soled shoes. Jenna in her pink and white trainers and Muz in his Magnum boots did not have the same issues. In strange contrast to the suit he was wearing, Chuck too was wearing heavy boots. Above their heads ran the power cables for the trains. Jenna looked up at them, in response to their constant faint buzzing.

  “Do you think the trains have been stopped as well?” she asked Muz. Walking along the train tracks went against some deeply ingrained survival instinct and she kept looking back, imagining she had heard a train approaching.

  “Long since,” Muz responded.

  “Must be causing mayhem for all the commuters in central,” Carl said.

  “Oh, those poor bastards,” Chuck replied.

  They passed near Pentavia Retail Park on the other side of the M1, marked by the unmistakable looming arc of white metal beams, a futuristic piece of artwork used unashamedly to support billboards that hung over the motorway.

  At this point, a pedestrian tunnel passed under the train line from Grahame Park Way and continued as a footbridge over the road, leading to the retail park. The passing group saw, hanging side by side from that footbridge, suspended by theirs necks from knotted bed sheets, the two lifeless bodies of a young man and woman. For that couple, suicide had been clearly preferable to being eaten alive. None of the four people passing by below acknowledged the morbid presence of the swingers by talking about them.

  “Movies and voodoo aside,” Muz said to Chuck, in an effort to divert his own attention from the corpses above. “You did spend the night surrounded by those crazy people though. Is there anything you learned about what has happened or their behaviour that might help us?”

  “No,” Chuck answered, still feeling annoyed by Carl’s questions, but he conceded to elaborate. “All I know is they’re gathering in larger and larger groups. I drove down one deserted street after another without seeing a single person, then, bam, I found myself facing a whole crowd of them and had to plough my way through.”

  “Plough your way through?” Muz repeated the man’s words, concerned by what they implied.

  “You’ve seen what they’re like,” Chuck responded defensively. “I had no choice.”

  The train tracks followed the stretching arc of Grahame Park Way, which ran along at the bottom of the slope to their right. All that stood between them and that road was a flimsy wire mesh fence. It did not look as though it would stand up well against a massing attack and this made the four walkers nervous.

  Muz’s own particular worries were only compounded by his realisation that they were now no more than a couple of hundred metres away from Colindale police station, yet, they had still not reached the current outer cordon of the quarantined area. He felt desperate, after all he had been through, finally to reach such a barrier and escape all this madness.

  As he and the others passed by the junction of Grahame Park Way and Corner Mead down to their right, they saw a single man staggering along the latter road, struggling under the deadweight of the girl he was carrying in his arms. His hair was unwashed and slick with grease, his face bore two-day old stubble and tear tracks cut their way through the dried blood on his cheeks. He wore nothing but a pair of dirty white Y-fronts and a black heavy metal T-shirt. When he opened his mouth and shouted out to no one in particular, they realised it was not just the burden of the blood-soaked girl that was causing him to buckle and sway as he walked.

  “Come on then, you mental bastards,” he yelled, slurring the words, his voice heavy with inebriation.

  The volume of his booming challenge in the otherwise empty air and the stench of blood brought many assailants emerging from between the residential blocks of the estate. Seeing the gathering crowd, as one, Muz and the other three with him ducked down and hid behind a group of birch saplings.

  As the growing number of flesh-hungry attackers converged on where the drunken man now stood, he bent and deposited the dead girl in her filthy nightdress on the ground at his feet, as gently as his state of intoxication would allow. Drawing a hammer from where he had slung it from his belt, he swung it wildly at those leading the murderous advance. Despite being drunk beyond all coordination, he managed to land a few lucky blows.

  The four hidden observers winced in unison, as they heard the bone-splintering crack of that hammer caving in a man’s skull, causing him to drop mid-stride and hit the road face first with an equally sickening smack that burst open his nose and dislocated his jaw. Though he was no longer any threat, other attackers strode over him, treading his head further into the tarmac, to reach the valiantly and furiously fighting man.

  “Shouldn’t we try and help him?” Carl asked the others.

  Neither Muz nor Jenna voiced any response.

  “You can go try if you want,” Chuck answered the man.

  Carl however made no move to go the man’s assistance and remained cowardly hidden with the others.

  Though he fought with a wide-eyed bitter mourning rage, there were simply too many attackers for the drunk to keep at bay. The backswing of his arm caused the claw of the hammer to burry itself deep in the chest of a young Indian man with a pencil line beard. Lodged between the ribs of the man, the weapon was no longer of any use but the drunken man stil
l tried to retrieve it. As he pushed his bare foot against the Asian man’s chest and tugged at the wooden handle, he lost his balance and fell over.

  With that mistake, he was lost from sight, as the mass of murderers fell on him and fed on his soft, fatty meat. Their teeth tore at the still warm and fresh body of the girl he had been carrying too. Despite the gruesome and ultimately fatal wounds he suffered, the alcohol in the man’s system numbed the majority of his pain, and he managed to remain conscious long enough to see his twelve-year-old daughter reanimated.

  The girl’s dead, vacant eyes now refocused, taking him in. She blinked away the spots of crusty blood that had dried over her pupils, and then lunged up at her despairing father, biting into the carotid artery of his neck and relishing the hot spray that drenched her. As the sudden blood loss caused the man to at last lose consciousness, his last sight was that of his innocent young girl guzzling his spilling blood. He died with an expression of utter despair and loss in his eyes.

  Jenna turned away and began to sob into the hands she held pressed against her face.

  “I’m going to die,” she whimpered.

  Carl also turned away from the stomach turning scene of horror, pretending to comfort Jenna but the truth was he could no more bare to watch the mutilation than she could.

  The four of them remained where they were for at least twenty minutes, while the cannibals down on the road picked over the remains of their kills and began to turn on each other. If they broke cover now, presented against the skyline as they were, they would surely be seen by at least one of the killers and that would be all it would take. The rickety wire mesh fence couldn’t possibly hold back the weight of those numbers for more than a few seconds. So they sat tight, forced to listen to the inhuman snarling, snapping and moaning coming from the sick and insane group.

  Luckily for the four cowering survivors, but not so much for the poor animal in question, a hungry and confused Staffordshire bullterrier unwittingly wandered out into the road in line of sight of the crowd. At the sight of this new prey, the people instantly stopped mutilating each other and sprinted off after the meagre meal. Some of those that ran on all fours managed to match the terrified dog’s pace as it fled. Watching this, Muz felt sure that the poor animal would give in to fatigue before its pursuers did.

  “Let’s get out of here before they wander back this way,” he said to the others.

  Getting back to their feet, they carried on along the tracks, Jenna still sniffing back mucus and tears. Muz ignored her and drove them onwards. He hadn’t considered for a second that the sickness could have spread this far without being brought under control. His fear that the police station might not be the place of safety he had been hoping grew more and more likely with each step. His eyes were trained strictly on the bend ahead in the road they were hand railing, still clinging to the hope that it would soon reveal the cordon.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t do anything to help that guy,” Carl said.

  No one else made a comment. Nor did any of them dare to make eye contact with anyone else for a while, so deep was their guilt.

  They lost sight of the road to their right, on which the police station was situated, as it arced away from the rigidly straight path of the train line they were following. As they passed by the on-slip flyover for the M1 to their left, Muz announced that they were coming up to the rear of the RAF museum, directly next door to the police station.

  “We need to cut through the museum grounds to get to the nick,” he told the fatigued men and woman.

  When Jenna saw that this meant climbing over yet another wall that stood in their way, she felt utterly deflated. The men helped her over again though, and on the other side, they found themselves in the museum’s large empty car park.

  “This place has a secure perimeter and the main gate would have been locked when this all first went bent,” Muz said, as they paused momentarily to look all around them and listen intently for any tell-tale sounds. “There shouldn’t be anyone in these grounds.”

  Cutting between two of the several large buildings, they emerged at the front of the museum and there saw a couple of spitfires mounted on poles a few feet off the ground. Once working machines, which had helped the Alliance win the Second World War, now they were nothing more than sculptural pieces, positioned to give the impression that they were frozen in mid-flight.

  Near them, there was a huge piece of abstract modern art that Muz had guessed, when he had first seen it, was meant to represent the power and speed of a jet-powered aircraft taking off. Despite getting the implication of dramatic movement from the static structure, his overriding opinion of it had always been that it was just a huge pile of shit. He knew that if someone were to tell him how much it had cost, he would end up becoming absurdly angry.

  The rest of the group scurried past the sculpture without the slightest thought for it, and on the far side of the car park, they found themselves confronted by a thirteen foot brick wall. It was the final barrier to stand between them and their goal, the police station.

  “Well, we’re not getting over that,” Chuck stated flatly but with a slight pleading edge to his voice, as though he were begging the others not to make him try.

  “Follow me,” Muz said, and to Chuck’s relief, led them along a narrow strip between the impassable wall and a huge hangar.

  At the other end of the hangar, they found themselves mere feet from Grahame Park Way. All that now stood between them, the road and the nick was a seven-foot fence comprised of vertical metal bars. The fence was topped by a horizontal rail instead of the more usual spikes, which made clambering over it fairly easy.

  Once the last of them was over and standing on the road, they quickly and furtively scurried across the lawn at the front of the police station. As Muz led them past the public front double doors, they activated a motion sensor and the doors automatically swung open. As one, Jenna, Carl and Chuck all jumped in fright at the sudden unexpected motion.

  Without even slowing his stride, as he headed for the side gate, Muz looked into the reception. Obviously there were no members of the public there, waiting to be dealt with but there were also no officers to be seen on the other side of the counter behind the security glass. This alone worried Muz, but what really unnerved him were the bloody handprints smeared down the glass and the counter. From the brief glimpse he got however, the blood appeared only to be on this side of the counter, the glass security panels and the electronic doors were all intact. He therefore still clung to the hope that the nick had not succumbed to an attack.

  At the police only side entrance, barred by electronic pedestrian and vehicle gates that no one was going to force their way through, he hastily swiped his warrant card through the card reader. A little red light illuminated next to it.

  “Oh, for f...,” Muz growled, while the others, standing impotently by, looked nervously around them.

  He wiped the card against his trousers a couple of times then tried again. To his relief, this time a green light lit up and there was a loud click, as the electronic lock disengaged. Muz pushed on the heavy gate, waited for the others to follow him through, and pushed it firmly back in place. Only when he heard the second click of the lock re-engaging did he finally feel safe and emit a huge sigh of immense relief. Tears actually threatened to well in his eyes and he had to blink away the build-up of fluid repeatedly. He had finally made it.

  Chapter 5

  Mad Mandy

  They entered the police station via the side entrance, just beyond the sturdy security gate. It required another swipe from Muz’s warrant card before the building’s automated security system would allow them inside. It all felt very secure and comforting.

  Inside, they passed through a short corridor and found themselves stood at the bottom of a stairwell. Carl clutched both fists tight around his crowbar, holding it up to his shoulder in readiness to defend against a sudden attack. As they peered up between the flights that ascended all the w
ay up to the building’s third and uppermost floor, they could not make out any movement on the stairs. There was not a sound to be heard. The empty silence of the place was a stark contrast to the manic, panicked bustle that had filled the building when Muz had last been here only two days ago, prior to being driven off on the police carrier and dumped on a cordon he couldn’t have hoped to control. How long ago that now seemed.

  Right now, the only sound to fall on Muz’s ears was that of Jenna’s nervous breathing, as she stood up close beside him, her body almost pressed against his, as she joined him in looking up between the stairs. Muz glared at her grumpily and she responded like a chastised child, immediately backing away, with a wounded look in her eyes.

  Sticking to the ground floor, they walked over to the door that led to the main corridor, opened it, and again peered tentatively through, waiting momentarily to assess the situation beyond. Again, there was nothing to greet them but silence.

  “Looks like the place has been evacuated,” Chuck declared.

  Muz nodded in agreement but remained quiet. He still wasn’t satisfied there was no one besides them in here. Of course the station had been evacuated; it was within the containment area and had therefore been abandoned, just like everything and everyone else. Until now, Muz had naively thought of the nick as an impenetrable sanctum of safety. How stupid he had been, he realised. From the front reception, the premises had still looked secure though, and there were no obvious signs of it having been overrun.

  Pushing their way through another set of internal fire doors, they found themselves by the lifts now, with the door to the rear yard to their right. With the others still following him without question, Muz walked over to the door to the yard and pressed a large button on the wall. The automatic door swung open, allowing the cold air to flood in. Muz stepped out and looked around him.

  “Someone hold onto the door,” he said over his shoulder.

  It wasn’t that if the door closed and immediately locked itself behind them, they wouldn’t be able to get back in. Like the other external doors of the building, it simply required a swipe of Muz’s card to gain access, but should they suddenly find themselves under attack out here, he didn’t want to waste any time getting back inside.