Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (14 page)

“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 wit
h 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.

T
hey 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, eas
ily 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 an
d 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 a
t 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.

“W
hich 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 sur
vived 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

T
hey 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 being 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 regar
ded 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.

“Took that corner a bit too fast, did we?” Muz asked.

“I’m not sure I like your attitude, PC 621SX,” the man said, making a point of reading out Muz’s shoulder numbers.

“I’m sorry about that, but it’s been a bit of a rough shift,” Muz countered with blatant sarcasm. “You know, you might have seen that board of black and white chevrons marking that as a tight bend if you hadn’t been driving like a complete twat.”

“Okay
, that’s it,” the man said, his face becoming furious. “I assure you I will be filing a complaint just as soon…”

“
Oh will you fucking shut up?” Muz spat out venomously, having long since lost all concern for portraying a professional image. “I couldn’t give a stinking shit what you’re going to do.”

“I have a witness…” the man said meekly, pointing at Jenna who had been stood in silence, watching the confrontation.

“I’m not getting involved,” she replied, immensely grateful to Muz for saving her life on several occasions now.

“So, what happened to your
nice, shiny BMW?” Muz asked.

“I was car jacked. What are you going to do about that?”

Muz looked up from where he had been examining the damage to the Astra’s front axle.

“I’ll make it my priority to create a report just as soon as I get back to the nick,” he responded with acidity.

Muz walked away, motioning for Jenna to follow him, cutting through a gap in the privet to the park. The mist was thinning and beginning to lift from the mown fields that stretched out before them.

“Wait, where are you going?” the man complained.

Muz ignored him and carried on walking.

“I need assistance. People have gone crazy.
You have to call your colleagues to come get me,” the man went on.

“Do you think, if I could arrange for a lift, I would be walking these streets myself?”
Muz replied.

“So, where are you going?” the man shouted after him, following them through the gap in the hedge.

“Colindale police station,” the copper said.

Jenna looked back at the man. He looked afraid and despite his arrogant attitude, she felt sorry for him.

“You should come with us,” she advised him.

The man didn’t wait for a second offer and came running to catch them up.

“I’m Jenna.”

“I’m Carl,” the man said, sliding his hands back over his greying h
air, trying to get it to lay flat in its usually well-groomed manner.  “And what’s your name, officer?” Carl asked.

“PC Dogan,” Muz growled, pointing to his name badge. Was this idiot really trying t
o be nice now? Was he bipolar or something? “You’ve already got my shoulder number.”

“Where’s your colleague?” Carl asked without considering what the likely answer would be.

“Dead,” Muz informed him curtly.

Midway through the park, by the tennis courts, they came across a red Mini Cooper, abandon
ed on the footpath that led down towards the A1. As they approached, they could hear its radio still blaring away to itself. That had to mean the keys were still in the ignition. Looking all around, the three of them couldn’t see anyone in the whole of the park.

Examining the car, they saw the driver’s side window had been smashed and blood trailed down the door. Small pieces of the rubber
that coated the steering wheel had been torn away, as the driver had clung to it for dear life but had been wrenched out away.

“In an interview,” the radio said
, “the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police stated that containment had proven nearly impossible and resources had been stretched beyond breaking point. Consequently, the mayor of London has handed over immediate control of the city to the military and has stated that…”

Muz turned the keys in the ignition, trying to turn the engine over, cau
sing the radio to die. It must have been playing for hours on end without the engine running, draining the battery. Muz tried to start the car again and again and again, until turning the key gave virtually no response at all. He smacked the steering wheel hard with the palm of his hand.

“We could try bumping it,” Carl suggested.

“We could,” Muz said, considering it, “but if we got it going, we would have to pretty much stick to the roads where there’s likely to be people and sod’s law, it would cut out on us at the worst possible time. The window’s smashed, so anyone can reach in. We’re probably better off without it and the nick’s not far off now.”

He climbed out and began walking again. Carl followed, swayed by his logical reasoning but Jenna paused, looking yearningly at the car.

“We should give it a go,” she pleaded.

“Forget it. It’s a death trap,” Muz called back over his shoulder.

Only when the two men had left her well behind did she kick a wheel and break into a gangly sprint after them.

The three of them
reached the end of the park, and climbing a steep embankment, found themselves looking at the scene of utter carnage that was the A1. Cars filled every lane, pretty much bumper to bumper, in both directions. None were moving or even appeared to be occupied.

A white transit van had had its body
work destroyed on both sides, as the driver had clearly tried to force it forward, between the crash barrier on the central reservation and the other vehicles in the outside lane, shunting them over into the middle lane, where they had collided with the cars there.

In
desperation, the cab of a truck had literally mounted the rear of the car in front and driven over it. The car was so badly crushed that its make and model could not easily be determined. The truck cab was now just hanging there, its drive wheels suspended impotently off the ground.

The path the three of them had followed through the park continued under the major road
, through a pedestrian underpass. Access to the tunnel however was completely denied by two cars that had been forced off the road above and now lay one on top of the other.

Despite the disarray and damage, there had to be some serviceable vehicle
s with the keys still in the ignition, Muz decided. But, even if this were true, there would be no way of driving them free of the pile up.

“Bad, isn’t it
?” Carl said to Jenna, in a huge understatement.

“Are all the main roads like this?” she asked him.

“All the one’s I’ve seen,” he told her. “That’s why I was trying to make my way up the back roads, before that stupid car lost control.”

Muz looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Hey, that wasn’t my fault, officer,” Carl said adamantly.

“I didn’t say a word,” Muz replied.

“My 3 Series would have made that bend easily.”

“What
ever you say,” Muz said dismissively, returning his eyes to the pile-up in front of them. “I really don’t like the look of this.”

“What? Why? What’s wrong,” Jenna asked urgently, suddenly unnerved by Muz’s apprehension.
She was learning fast to respond to his intuition.

“Look at it,” Muz told her.
“There could be anyone crawling around in among all those cars.”

Jenna automatically took a nervous step back from the road.

“But the police station is over that way, right?” Carl asked.

“Yep,” Muz said, scrutinizing all the vehicles and crouching to look underneath them.

“So, we’ve got to get across,” Carl concluded.

“Yep.”

Despite the obvious necessity, the three just stood there for at least a minute, before Muz finally took the initiative and stepped out into the road. They squeezed between the vehicles and clambered over their bonnets and boots.

Muz couldn’t help but think how they could not be more than six hundred metres south of The Broadway and Mill Hill Circus, where on TV he had seen the sprawling crowd of demented people. If he and his two followers were suddenly
to find themselves under attack right now, they would have great difficulty in making a break for it.

Squeezing between the front bumper of a car and the back of a van, Carl found the rear door
s of the latter to be open. Inside, there were boxes of numerous tools.

“Well, well, well. L
ook what I’ve found,” he said, delving around inside the back of the van and pulling out a crowbar. “You going to arrest me for theft if I take it, officer?”

“Under the circumstances, I suppose not,” Muz replied
. Though if I was the Dickhead Police, you’d be in real trouble, he thought.

As Jenna edged her way down the gap between the sides of two cars,
she saw an old man slumped dead at the wheel. He had deep bloody scratches down his face and two sets of teeth marks in his forehead. Several pints of blood had spilled from a bite wound in his neck and down his woollen jump. His last act appeared to have been to phone a loved one, as the mobile was lying on the seat between his legs. The window was open. Trying not to look at the man’s face, Jenna reached in for the phone.