“Now that’s how zombies should move,” Carl stated, remarking on his slow clumsy staggering.
“Is no one going to put him out of his misery?” Amy asked, her eyes brimming with sorrow for the man’s plight.
“I can’t be bothered,” Chuck reluctantly responded, as he was the one she was looking directly at. “Those cow’s will find him soon enough.”
Muz and Carl chose to ignore her, while Tom seemed oblivious to the conversation, scanning intently ahead of them.
“You didn’t seem to have had a problem killing these people so far?” Amy pressed the fat man.
“Yeah, well, believe it or not, I’ve had my fill of killing for one day,” Chuck retorted with acidity.
The afflicted man’s skin was grey and wrinkled, not from age but from the rapid necrosis. If the cows did not find him, falling apart through cellular decay, through being unable to ingest food, would be his certain fate. The group left him behind, lurching hopelessly this way and that in the middle of the road, bumping into cars.
At long last, and with great relief, they reached the point where Kings Drive met Lacey Drive, and just beyond the corner of the crossroads, they saw rising high above, Salisbury Court, some thirteen storeys high. There were several other towers and shorter blocks of flats. All were constructed from dreary grey concrete and were filthy with age.
The car parks and grass between the blocks were littered with shopping trolleys, a broken child’s buggy, a wet stinking mattress and other discarded items. In the gutter there lay a dead dog, half its face missing, its fur matted and dirty. Muz found himself wondering, possibly a little dramatically, whether the dog would have still been there even if the current situation had not been what it was. This was the Stonegrove, one of the shittiest of north London’s estates.
It had taken Muz a whole day and a half to walk his way here from where he had originally been dropped off in Mill Hill by his Sergeant in the carrier. It was a journey that, on any normal day, would have been no more than a ten-minute drive.
The scene was devoid of movement, save for a plastic child’s ball rolling slowly along and the ravens that squawked and fought among themselves. The carrion-eaters with their beady black eyes had gathered in unprecedented numbers to feed on the dead. Their pickings here were very slim however, and they squabbled over the corpse of the canine. It seemed that the cows left little at all in the wake of their slaughter.
Though the birds had been eating the flesh of the infected for some time, not one of them had succumbed to the cross-species affliction. The information transfer normally passed by the artificially encoded cells had no effect on them. The de-coding stem cell spread was limited purely to mammals, due to the specific nature of Doctor Raj Shah’s fine-tuned genetic manipulation.
At the base of Salisbury Court, a window of one of the ground floor flats had been left ajar and the group could hear a TV blaring away to itself within. The flat had to be unoccupied. No one in his or her right mind would allow the volume to be so high.
“Traffic chaos,” a voice from the telly was blurting out, “surrounding the unknown outbreak in north London has brought routes through both central London and surrounding counties almost to a complete standstill. Drivers are advised to avoid attempting to travel on such roads, particularly the M1, closed south of junction three, the A1, closed south of junction two, the A5, the A406 North Circular and the M25 between junctions twenty-one and twenty-six. A road safety official told us earlier that before road users embark...”
Muz found solace in the man’s voice. His fears had begun to run wild and he had found himself fretting that the epidemic was coursing across the whole of England now. The TV report however confirmed that it was still only confined to a portion of London; his family were still safe.
“Okay, let’s get inside,” Chuck decided, heading towards the tower.
“Why don’t we just keep heading for the cordon?” Carl asked, feeling the need the escape this madness more than ever. “It can’t possibly be much farther now and we’ve made it this far.”
“Margaret’s in a bad state,” Muz told him, “and Amy’s like catnip to those people at the minute. Let’s just get up to the top of this block, have a rest, see what we can see and then go from there.”
Carl shrugged grumpily and followed the copper.
“Besides,” Muz continued to say, “I know it sounds daft, but it’s too quiet.”
He didn’t normally use the ‘Q’ word while on duty, but it just slipped out and he winced in response. It was a police superstition that as soon as someone said it, all hell would break loose. He was as bad as Chuck with his irrational beliefs, he told himself.
“Are you saying you’d prefer to see more of those zombies staggering about the place?” Carl asked.
“No, of course not. It’s just that these streets are so dead it’s making me nervous.”
Just as Muz said this, the two men walking at the rear of the group heard a loud bang from above. They both instantly turned their heads up in the direction of the sound and saw a window of one of the seventh floor flats still flexing in its frame. Then they saw, even higher up, someone slam against another pane. Carl and Muz looked back at each other. The cows had cleared the streets for them but mad cannibals were still lurking in the blocks. And, it seemed, they been had stirred into animation by the sight of the succulent band of survivors.
“Oh please, not again,” was all Muz could say.
The rest of the group ahead of them had also stopped and were looking upward at the rising grey slab of the block. Before anyone of them could have any further reaction though, the seventh floor window smashed and out fell a man, snarling, arms and legs flailing.
“Holy mother of God,” Carl cried out, as the man slammed with unbelievable force into paving slabs of the path no more than three feet in front of him.
Clots of congealed blood and pieces of meat burst free of the man’s body and spattered the pathway and grass, along with the shards of broken glass. Despite having broken both legs, an arm, and his breastbone, the madman was still moving. Using his one remaining good arm, he pulled himself up onto the shattered remains of his thighs, the rest of his tattered legs trailing behind him, and began to scuttle towards Carl on the three limbs. Despite being a macabre mess of twisted body parts, he was still concerned only with reaching the food standing before him.
There then came the repeated sound of shattering glass, as, without a moment’s thought for his safety or the pain he would surely suffer, a second man threw himself out of a window. He too hit the ground with a horrible crunch.
“Dumb bastards,” Carl said, holding his knife ready.
As the broken remains of the first jumper, hissing through his teeth in utter agony, pulled himself slowly forward, Carl stepped to one side and drove his blade into the back of his neck. The knife slipped between two vertebrae and cleanly severed the spinal cord. The man slumped, incapable of any further coordinated action.
“Get away from the block,” Chuck called out, as there came yet another crash from above and another body hit the grass to their left.
“Tak. Ladies to move back,” Tom agreed, ushering Amy and Margaret backwards.
“Look at this,” Muz said to Carl, distracted by what he saw at his feet. “This thing is moving.”
Inching along the ground, edging its way towards him was a little lump of clotted blood. Chuck came over and saw what he was looking at.
“Explain that,” the big man challenged the copper.
Muz failed to respond, simply staring down in wide eyed disbelief at the lump of maroon blood dragging itself along with slug-like locomotion.
All the while, there came sounds of further shattering, as more and more bodies rained down amid broken glass around them. Most, as a result of their fall, were far too badly injured to be of much concern, but as the human downpour continued, some had their fall broken by other bodies and they suffered less as a consequence.
On
top of this, the group heard the raging din of screaming coming from the open doors and the stairwell beyond. Seconds later, more crazies came staggering out the entrance, ravenous for flesh. The first of these, the survivors were pleased to see, was struck down mid-stride by a falling body. Those behind him however trod on both, lurching forward with full haste. Thus, the group again found themselves outnumbered amid the throng of a fight.
Disturbed from their search for morsels of bloody remains, the ravens leapt up into the air. The chorus of their dry calls was so loud it was as though they were spurring on the onrushing attackers.
Amy immediately grabbed Digby by the collar again, as he began to lunge forward to protect her. She also kept close by Margaret’s side, taking hold of her upper arm. With both her hands thus occupied, she hoped the men would be able to protect her.
Margaret had ceased her low muttering, but still, she didn’t seem as though she was altogether there. If the woman took off again, leaving the relative safety of the group, she might not be so lucky as to evade the attentions of their attackers a second time.
Doing their best to put themselves between the women and the onrushing psychos, the four men swung for all they were worth with their various instruments of death. Chuck and Tom again seemed to be dropping the majority of the ensuing crowd. This wasn’t just down to their superior strength and seemingly fearless vigour. Their blunt weapons, the candlestick, and the hammer, were much more effective than the other two men’s stabbing weapons. Both Carl’s knife and Muz’s rail spike, when plunged into someone, would sometimes get caught on bone or cartilage and it took valuable seconds and precious energy to rip them free. Taking note, Muz drew his baton. With a weapon in each hand, he felt more confident.
Still, all four of them together were doing a fair job of holding off the mass of people. Each of them was becoming frighteningly efficient at stopping a crazed person in their tracks, and stopping them permanently. Chuck in particular found he had more energy than he had felt in years, as he allowed his anger to well within him.
“Why are you only killing the black ones?” Chuck shouted at Carl, as he saw him first stab a ten-year-old Somalian girl and then turn to hack at the neck of a Caribbean looking man with silver hair.
“I’m killing the ones… that are nearest and look… the most dangerous,” Carl responded indignantly and out of breath.
“Did that little girl look the most dangerous to you?” Chuck pushed him.
“Hey, she was bloody fast.”
“So you’re saying it’s just coincidence that all the people you’ve dropped so far are black?” Chuck asked, smashing a white guy so hard in the temple with his candlestick that the man’s eye actually protruded from its socket.
“They’re not,” Carl protested. “That man I took down before the girl… the fat fuck… he was white.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“He was… He only looks black because… he’s so rotten… And what about her? She’s green.”
He wasn’t wrong. The five foot three woman wearing a dressing gown and fluffy slippers, who had to be in her eighties, was decaying so badly that all her visible skin was a pallid yellow-green. In fact, many of their assailants were so rotten that the group found themselves struggling to breathe and not vomit. The stench filling their nostrils was almost overpowering.
Stood beside Carl and Chuck, Muz tried to ignore their bickering and concentrate on staying alive. He could barely believe that either of them had the energy or composure to engage in discourse at a time like this.
A young skinny man with a large tattoo of a dragon drawn across his ribs came at the copper. He was one of the faster ones, lightning fast, and looked as though he had probably only recently turned, having had a chunk of his throat bitten out. The bony man was on Muz before he could react and he bit down hard on his stab vest. Even when his actions caused two of his upper incisors to work loose, the man continued to bite down. Muz was thankful that he had decided to continue wearing the heavy vest all this time. There had been many a time, particularly when it caused his lower back to ache, that he had wanted to unzip the thing and throw it off.
Seeing Muz was struggling badly under the force of the skeletal man’s frenzy, Tom thundered over to him. Without so much as a pause, he turned his hammer in his hand, so that the claw faced forward, and rammed the prongs into the side of the skinny man’s head, using the implement like a hook to drag him off Muz. He then tore the hammer free and beat him over and over until he stopped moving.
That was twice now the stocky Pole had saved his life, Muz thought gratefully.
“You’re a racist mother fucker,” he heard Chuck say to Carl. They were still at it.
“If anyone’s racist… it’s you,” Carl said, still giving some back.
“Why?”
“Because you clearly think… all white men are racist. That’s racist.”
“That’s ’cos you’re all racist pricks.” Chuck’s killing fury was full blown now and he was using Carl to keep him going.
“See… I told you.”
“I’ve met a lot of nice white women though,” Chuck went on, finding a brief half second to turn to Carl with a grin. “Real nice.”
“Fuck you,” Carl spat back.
“Fuck you too, you white racist prick.”
“You do realise that’s… inherently… hypocritical… Don’t you?”
As out of place as the dialogue seemed to the others amid this fight for survival, it worked for Carl as much as it did Chuck, serving to distance himself a little from his desperate plight and from the horrific wounds he was inflicting on the people who were trying to surround them.
Chuck didn’t normally play the stereotypical role of the black guy with a chip on his shoulder. He had nothing against white people. It was just that he was sure he sensed a little hidden racist element in Carl.
“This is what I’ve always loved about working in Barnet,” Muz said, unable to stop himself from joining in, as he kicked the person he was currently wrestling with in the gut and stabbed him deep in the nasal cavity.
“What’s that?” Chuck asked.
“The integration of such rich cultural diversity,” the copper answered.
Amy, absolutely terrified now, had dragged Margaret down into a squatting position, hidden behind the men, hugged both the woman and Digby as tight as she could. The dog was going totally crazy, barking his head off, and it was quite literally all she could do to keep hold of him.
Tom, unable to concentrate enough to decipher what the other men were talking about, while at the same time focusing on the fight, continued to battle on in virtual silence. He dropped back a few steps, seeing that some of the undead were beginning to flank them, and turned his attention on those attackers who were in danger of getting to the females.
One particularly fetid looking man with bedraggled hair and a greying beard ran at Carl while he was struggling to pull his knife free from someone’s ribs. The hairy madman in nothing but Y-fronts was one of the more rotten of the horde, his skin darkening from yellow-green to blue-brown. Carl couldn’t pry the knife loose in time before the cannibal was on him. All he could think to do instead was duck and ram his head into the man’s stomach. It was not a good idea.
As he bent his head forward and the raging decomposing man slammed into him, his head actually penetrated his attacker’s abdomen, his rotten skin tearing easily. With his head fully buried within the stomach, Carl pressed both hands against the man’s body and pushed back as hard as he could. He managed to dislodge his now wet stinking head, but wrapped tight around his neck were the bearded man’s entrails. As Carl panicked and choked, the guts only wrapped tighter still about his throat. He slumped to the ground, dragging the bearded man down by his own exposed intestines.
Wrestling in the grass with the unravelling man, he found himself facing the other’s crotch at close quarters. In his panicked frenzy, he grabbed at the bloodied Y-fronts, unintentionally yanking t
hem down around the man’s upper thighs. Shockingly, he then saw that there was nothing more than a chewed mess of a cavity where his penis and gonads had once been. Carl felt bile rising with a sudden rush from his stomach and had his throat not been so forcefully constricted, he would have vomited directly into the other man’s pelvic cavity. With his brain starved of oxygen, he blacked out.
Muz came to his aid. He stomped repeatedly on the bearded man’s hairy head and stabbed at his neck. Only when the rail spike had all but removed the head from the rest of the body did he stop and try to pull the guts from around Carl’s throat. The man in the custody clothes had gone pale and his lower lip was decidedly blue with cyanosis.
Muz struggled frantically but the entrails were so tight and slimy that he could barely keep his hold on them. He began to despair, his efforts having no effect. Then he saw Carl’s knife in the grass. He picked it up and as rapidly as he dare, cut through the wet grey tubes. Stinking shit spilled out and Muz wretched violently but didn’t stop cutting, though he could barely see through the water welling in his eyes. Finally, he sliced through the last strand and Carl slid free. His neck was a deep purple and he wasn’t moving.
Margaret released an almighty scream, one of anger rather than fear, in response to being in the eye of a tornado of insanity that now fully encircled her. Her face grim with determination, she tried to get to her feet but Amy pulled her back down.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the plump young woman assured her, though the tears tumbling down her cheeks and the tremble in her voice said otherwise.
Margaret stared back fixedly, her eyes brimming with rage.
Just then, they heard a high-pitched war cry. Amy looked up to see, running from across the road, there came a slim boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen years. He was waving a small hatchet in one hand and a wooden baseball bat in the other. As he sprinted towards the fight, the hood of his black top came down, revealing a pale fresh face and a head of shaved blonde hair. With a skill and ferocity that should have been beyond his years, he swung and hacked at the cannibals, joining Chuck and Tom in their defiant stance.
Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel Page 28
