“Here,” Chuck said, shaking his head in disbelief at Muz and throwing the required item at Carl. While Muz’s thieving spree had been mainly limited to food and water, Chuck had thought to steal both these and a variety of other items. Things a person might need in a survival situation: matches, lighters, a cheap-looking Swiss Army knife, a bottle of Savlon, a roll of strong tape, a tube of super-glue, a mini sewing kit, et cetera - and an inordinate number of boxes of cigarettes.
As Carl was coaxing the last few beans from the bottom of the upturned can into his mouth, Amy returned from the toilets. There was a dark damp watermark running down the inside of one of her thighs from where she had done her best to scrub out the blood. She came over and sat with the others, looking through the selection of food and choosing a can of mixed fruit salad.
“So, how do you suppose this is all spreading?” Carl asked her, passing her the can opener and pretending not to notice the damp patch between her legs.
“I’m really not qualified to answer that,” Amy replied.
“You’re more qualified than the rest of us. Give it your best guess,” Muz asked.
“Well,” the little paramedic began to postulate, “if I had to guess, I would say that such a rapid spread of violent psychosis is most likely caused by a virus, bacteria, or some other pathogen.”
“So how do we catch it?” Carl asked with concern.
“It’s definitely not airborne,” Amy told him. “Otherwise, we’d all be infected, unless we represent the immune minority. Same goes for food and water supplies. From what I’ve seen, a person only develops the symptoms having been attacked by someone who themselves is infected. I think it’s therefore safe to say that, whatever it is, it’s passed on by direct body fluid contact.”
“When we were out there just now, one of them didn’t behave like the others,” Muz told Amy. “He didn’t attack us.”
“Really?” Both Amy and Carl responded in unison.
“He was easily close enough, but he just stood there,” Muz elaborated.
“And he was definitely infected?” Amy asked, more than a little dubious of what Muz was saying.
“You saw him, Chuck. Tell her,” Muz said.
“He must have had a blow to the head,” was all the fat man said in return.
“No, he was different,” Muz protested.
Chuck shook his head dismissively.
“When you ran off and left me, he came and saved me from the other people.”
“He did what?” Chuck blurted back, laughing aloud at the very idea.
“He did,” Muz insisted. “He fought off the others so that I could escape.”
“You really think that?” Chuck asked, smirking.
“It’s what I saw.”
“I’ve seen those dead bastards fight each other too,” Chuck told him, his laughter now replaced by a cold seriousness. “He just wanted you all for himself. Keep it together, man, or you’ll end up believing in voodoo and films, like that idiot.” He nodded over at Carl who scowled back.
The four of them remained silent for some time after that, as they ate and mulled over what Amy had concluded and Muz’s account. Amy took the tape from Chuck and used it to strap up Carl’s finger, using its neighbouring digit as a splint. Carl winced and moaned all the while. It was Chuck who finally spoke next.
“I doubt we’ll make it to those blocks before nightfall,” he announced, staring fixedly at the trail of smoke lifting in wisps from the end of his cigarette.
Muz considered this and nodded in agreement.
“So we’re spending the night here,” Carl said with obvious relief at postponing returning outside for as long as possible.
The hard wood of the benches was not an ideal bed, and with neither a pillow nor a blanket, it would be difficult to sleep, but it had to beat trying to walk up the tube line in the dark.
“Are you sure you’re going to be alright spending the night in a church?” Carl asked Chuck, a wry smile crossing his face.
Muz regarded him, wondering where he was going with such a question and instinctively knowing it couldn’t be good.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Chuck responded, frowning in disdain at the man.
“Well, you know, Jesus was a zombie,” Carl informed him, his grin broadening.
“What? What the hell did he just say?” Chuck asked incredulously, turning to Muz.
Muz shrugged, an expression of despair building on his own brow in apprehension for what new crap was about to fall out of Carl’s mouth.
“Jesus was a zombie,” Carl reiterated. “He died on the cross, and then three days later, he rose from the dead.”
“He was the son of God,” Chuck managed to say, despite his shock. “Him coming back from the grave didn’t mean he was a zombie.”
“Hey, you’re the one that believes in zombies,” Carl replied. He was clearly enjoying winding up the big man. “He was dead. Then he was alive again. Zombie.”
“Listen. I may have fallen from God’s grace a long time ago,” Chuck stated in an intimidatingly calm voice. “But I was raised in a good Christian house. If my mother, God rest her soul, were here to hear you coming out with that blasphemy, she’d knock you into next week.”
Carl considered pointing out that would make Chuck’s mother a zombie, but wisely thought better of it.
“I take it those two don’t get on?” Amy asked Muz.
“I think there’s a level of sexual tension between them,” Muz replied with a smirk, causing Amy to laugh.
Amy and Muz continued to converse, as the light began to dwindle from the world beyond the church’s barred windows. She asked him about his family and in turn, told him of her fiancé who lived down in Kent during the week, tears welling in her eyes. Chuck sat silent, chain smoking and glaring broodingly over at Carl, who was paying an unnecessary amount of attention to his swollen finger. After a while, Amy removed one of the little cotton bullets from her trouser pocket and said she needed to go to the toilet again.
“I’ll come with you,” Muz told her.
“What?” Amy asked, a worried expression crossing her face.
“I’ll stand just outside the door,” Muz said. “I just don’t want a reoccurrence of what happened to Jenna.”
“But we’ve checked the whole building,” Carl said, understanding the copper’s fears and trying to placate him.
“Who’s Jenna?” Amy asked.
“Yeah, but there’s windows to the outside in the toilets,” Muz explained.
“They’re all locked,” Chuck now cut in. “And no zombie’s got the intelligence to force…”
“I just want to be safe,” Muz cut him off. “I think we should all go everywhere in a minimum of pairs from now on.”
Chuck shrugged and Carl returned to poking at his purple finger.
“Who’s Jenna,” Amy asked again.
“She was part of our group for a while… before she was eaten,” Muz said.
Amy looked horrified.
“And fucked,” Carl added. “Eaten and fucked at the same time by a crazy cannibal dead copper. Can you believe that?”
Amy’s big brown eyes widened even further.
“I mean, that puts a hell of a twist on necrophilia, doesn’t it?” Carl concluded with a grin.
“You’re the one that’s twisted,” Chuck spat out, disgusted by the man’s flippant recount.
“Hey, I’m not the one who shot her through the bleeding head.”
Chuck leapt off the pew at Carl, but Muz too sprung to his feet and tried to push him back into his seat. The larger man was so heavy that he didn’t budge an inch, but he also made no further move to get at Carl.
“She was gonna turn,” Chuck said weakly and slumped back down onto the bench.
On that heavy note, Amy went off to the toilet with Muz in tow. When they returned, with little else being said between them, the group settled down for the night. With a sigh of great relief, Muz shed his stab vest. Underneath, his shir
t stunk and was damp with sweat.
Glancing over at where Chuck was bedding down, he saw him taking off the suit jacket he had been wearing over the top of his custody clothing. As Chuck neatly folded the jacket and placed it over the backrest of his pew, Muz was able to see, attached to the inside lining of the garment, a store security tag. The jacket was brand new – and stolen. Why was a man who could afford to drive a new Audi TT wearing a stolen jacket, Muz asked himself. Unless the car hadn’t been his either.
Muz lay back and stretched out. Lifting his hands up in front of his face, he saw that they were trembling badly. He clenched both fists tightly in order to stop the shaking. The stress of all that had happened over the last couple of days was clearly affecting him even more than he had realised. Despite this, fatigue claimed him quickly, and with yearning thoughts for both his wife and daughter, he fell asleep.
He hadn’t been out long however, before Carl began to snore loudly, the sound echoing around the bare walls and the high ceiling of the room. The noise managed to attract the attention of some of the afflicted passing aimlessly by outside. Suddenly, the heavy wooden doors rattled in their frame.
“Christ,” Muz called out, waking with such a start that he actually fell off his bench.
“Don’t say that in church,” Chuck chastised him. He himself had not yet slept a wink, kept awake by Carl’s rasping breaths.
Muz clambered up off the floor and, walking over to where Carl lay fitfully sleeping, gave the man a shove, telling him to roll over. As Carl did as instructed and his snoring stopped, Muz returned to his own bench and tried again to find comfort in the emptiness of sleep. Eventually, even Chuck managed to drift off.
From the basement beneath them, there came the soft noise of a cardboard box being bumped onto the floor. With all three men and the woman sleeping now, none of them heard the sound.
Chapter 8
Digby, Margaret & Tom
Muz woke in pain. His neck, shoulders, and lower back, were all stiff and sore from having been laid out all night on the unyielding wooden seat.
He felt immediately unnerved. Something had disturbed him from his sleep, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling before he was even fully awake. Without moving, he looked over at the pews directly across from his own, where he saw both Chuck and Amy still sleeping. Though he couldn’t see Carl, he could hear the rasping of the man’s breathing from the pew directly behind him.
There was another sound, a second exaggerated breathing, snuffling and grunts that belonged to neither Amy nor Chuck. Muz continued to remain still, attempting to ascertain exactly where in the room the owner of those lungs must be.
He then heard new sounds, a quiet padding and scraping against the floor. As his heart fluttered wildly, he again looked over at Chuck and now saw the man was staring back at him with wide alert eyes. Judging by his immobility and the tense expression on his face, he too could hear the sounds of the fifth person in the room.
Ever so slowly, Muz shifted his weight to prop himself upon one arm and raised his eyes just above the backrest of his bench. He scanned the room, looking for the intruder in the low early morning light that filtered in through the soot-coated windows. At first, he wasn’t able to see anyone, and for a moment, thought he must have imagined the sounds. Then, over by the table and the wall-mounted crucifix, his eyes picked out the shape of a hairy back and tail only just visible behind the backrest of the last bench.
Daring to sit fully upright, he was able to get a better view. Snuffling around the tasselled skirts of the cloth covering the table, there stood a dog. It was a large, heavyset animal, a German Shepherd-Rottweiler cross by the look of its black and tan markings, and that huge barrel of a chest.
‘Dog’, Muz mouthed silently, looking back at Chuck who still hadn’t moved a muscle. When the man looked confused, unable to guess what he was trying to say, Muz put his hands up to either side of his head, to simulate ears, and let his tongue loll out the side of his mouth. Chuck looked back at him as though he had gone completely insane. Muz gave up and looked back at the animal.
Head low to the ground, as it sniffed everything it passed, the dog came ambling up the central aisle between the rows of pews, still unaware it was being observed. Driven by its growing hunger, the dog had at last emerged from its hiding place among the boxes stored on the floor below. Right now, he was driven in particular by the stale cheesy smell of Carl’s bare feet, which hung out over the end of the bench.
The animal’s cold wet nose touched the sole of one foot, as he sampled the rank odour. The contact caused Carl’s toes to wiggle and his foot to twitch. The dog growled a little at the sudden movement, but then was compelled by the intoxicating aroma of those feet to give them a lick.
As the hungry beast’s enormous tongue left a sticky trail over the bottom of Carl’s filthy foot, the man, suddenly awake now, jumped with fright. Sitting bolt upright, he saw the monster canine and screamed. The sound caused Amy to jerk into life, she too crying out before she was even aware of what was going on.
The dog took a defensive step back. The thick fur of his hackles stood erect and his jowls peeled away to reveal cruelly large and pointed incisors. Snapping his powerful jaws, the dog snarled and barked. Whining uncontrollably, Carl tried to scoot back along the bench away from the enraged animal. Reacting instinctively to this show of fear however, the dog stepped towards him, inhuman eyes locked on those of the terrified man.
At that moment, Chuck let out a bark of his own, a cough he had been desperately stifling since the second his eyes had flickered open. The dog turned and snapped at him now, every muscle of his body tense, the claws of his huge feet gripping the hard floor of the hall. It looked round at Muz and Amy too and appeared indecisive as to what to do, attempting to determine which of the people watching him posed the most threat.
Chuck slowly reached over to his jacket where it was slung over the backrest of the pew and withdrew his handgun from the pocket. The dog regarded him with intense wary eyes. He did not know what the man was holding but he didn’t need to. The look in the dark-skinned man’s eyes told the animal that he was about to attack. Not seeing any obvious escape route and feeling trapped, the dog did the only thing he could.
As the animal advanced on him with clear intent, Chuck levelled his gun at the end of his extended arms and looked at that massive fanged wedge of a head through his sites.
“No,” Amy said suddenly. “Don’t.”
Chuck continued to stare down the gun at the animal coming for him.
“It’s just scared,” Amy protested.
“Me fucking too,” Chuck spit out through gritted teeth, wide eyes fixed resolutely on the dog. “It comes one step closer and…”
“Hey,” Amy called to the animal, lifting up a pack of cooked and sliced deli ham for it to see. “Hey, boy.”
The animal glanced at her and the meat but immediately returned his attention to Chuck, still growling challengingly.
“Put your gun down,” Amy said.
“No.”
“You’re scaring him.”
“I’m gonna do more than scare it.”
Amy quickly peeled off a slice of the meat and threw it at the dog. The beast jumped back in fright and looked down at the circular morsel. The smell of it filled his head and he immediately felt the saliva welling in his mouth, but still, he stared at Chuck and the others. He was so hungry he stomach actually hurt and the delicious odour of the food at his feet eventually clouded his mind of all other thoughts. Lowering his lump of a head, he bit at the meat and rapidly swallowed it down. He lifted his head again and growled once more at Chuck, but then turned slightly to regard Amy.
The woman threw another couple of slices at the dog but they fell short. The animal warily stepped forward to retrieve them, causing Chuck to visibly tense further.
“Calm down,” Amy told him with disdain.
“Get that thing away from me,” Chuck whispered.
With th
e meat again devoured, the dog licked at the floor a moment then looked up once more at Amy. This time she threw what remained of the pack of meat down the aisle, back towards the crucifix hanging on the rear wall. The bulky dog loped off after the food.
“I think it’s safe to put that away,” Amy told Chuck, nodding at the gun he still had trained on the animal.
“Just keep it away from me,” Chuck told her, breaking into a fit of coughing and spitting up lumps of mucus on the floor.
“Well, that’s nice,” Carl said to him, having recovered from his shock. “I thought you said you were raised Christian.”
“Can’t… help… it,” Chucked sputtered back, angry at the man for interrupting his daily morning necessity of hacking up his lungs. As soon as he had cleared his pipes, he lit up a cigarette.
Retrieving a can of Spam from one of the rucksacks, Amy opened it and went over to where the dog was standing and licking the floor. “Hey, boy. Look what I’ve got.”
The dog looked wary at first, but then regarded the can of mulched meat with expectant almost imploring eyes.
“Yeah, you’re a good boy really. Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yes, you are,” Amy muttered soothingly, as she squeezed the can and allowed the contents to slap out onto the tiles.
The dog frenziedly snatched up the lump, biting at it only twice to break it up before swallowing it down. Tendrils of drool flicked this way and that, causing Amy to recoil in disgust, while oddly laughing at the same time.
“Should she be playing with that thing?” Carl asked the other men, as they watched the plump little woman and the dog that was probably heavier than she was. “It could have whatever disease is affecting everyone.”
“It looks fine to me,” Muz replied.
With a little food in his belly and a vigorous chest rub from Amy, the dog calmed right down. When the woman stopped rubbing and withdrew her hand, the animal pawed at her insistently, his long claws raking her arm.
“Ow, not so hard,” Amy complained, once again running her fingers through the thick fur of the dog’s chest.
“How did it get in here anyway?” Carl asked. “All the doors and windows are locked and we searched the entire building.”
Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel Page 23
