Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (26 page)

Soon the officer’s screams of rage and pain were replaced by diminishing whimpers
, and his cursing obscenities changed to a pathetic begging. Then it was over. Mark’s form fell limp under the weight of the fat man, a dark red puddle of treacle-thick fluid emanating from where he lay.

As the hugely overweight murderer lustily ripped into his kill, Muz was back on his feet and again trying to climb the fence.
He had either not yet seen that his colleague was now a lost cause, or he was refusing to accept it. Carl and Chuck stood motionless, watching him, not knowing how tell him that the other officer was dead. It was Amy who stepped forward and grabbed Muz by an arm.

“Get off,” Muz demanded.

Amy maintained her grip and stared silently up at him. Muz held her gaze a moment, the urgency in his eyes fading into resignation. He stopped fighting her hold of him and looked down through the fence at where Mark lay.

“No,” he whispered.

“There was nothing…” Amy began to say.

“You bastard,” Muz bellowed at the fat man, cutting the woman off.

Responding to the sudden noise, feeling that his prize was under threat of being taken from him, the fat killer suddenly leapt face-first at the fence. It bowed dramatically under the impact of all that weight and Muz fell backward to the ground. With his fat cheeks pressed against the wires, the man stood in a challenging stance, flecks of blood and spit flying from his lips as he snarled. His crazed eyes flicked from Muz to stare directly at Amy. His nostrils flexed as he sniffed at the air between himself and the woman. Moaning with desire, he leaned harder against the fence, until the interlinking wires were cutting into his face.

H
e continued to stare at her for an unnerving length of time, then having decided that neither Muz nor the others here were about to interrupt his meal, he hunkered down again over the lifeless copper.

Muz again clambered back
to his feet and now turned his anger on Chuck.

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” he yelled furiously.

“I’ve barely got half a mag’,” Chuck replied coldly. “Yeah, it’s selfish but I’m keeping every round for my own protection from now on.”

“You total fucking prick,” Muz screamed wit
h such ferocity that the fat killer again looked over at him warily. Muz then stomped off along the side of the tracks. Throwing his feet hard against the ground as he walked helped only a little in venting his anger and misery.

Amy now saw that Carl’s face wa
s considerably whiter than before, and he was hissing through his teeth, while clutching his left hand in the other.

“Show me,” Amy said.

Carl reacted by cradling his injured hand against his chest, but Amy took hold of the wrist and pulled it towards her. She saw that the ring ringer was snapped at the second knuckle and bent at a right angle to the side. Her face remained calm as she gently turned the hand over in her own, examining the damage from all angles. Carl held his head over his right shoulder, not daring to look.

“It’s okay, it’s not broken. It’s just…” Halfway through what she was saying
, the little paramedic suddenly tugged on the finger and cracked the joint back into place.

Carl screamed and pulled his hand free
.

“… just dislocated,” Amy finished.

“What the? Aargh.”

“Sorry,” Amy said
, “but it needed resetting as soon as possible before it started to swell up and potentially trap nerves and blood vessels.”

Without as much as a ‘thanks’, Carl mooched off, still cradling his offended hand.

Taking a moment to give Chuck a long stare of unmistakable disgust, Amy then followed the other two men. With a last look at the dead officer, Chuck picked up the rear, having the good sense to maintain a gap between himself and the others.

Already a good distance further along the tracks, none of them saw
the life return to Mark’s eyes and him begin to fight back with a renewed strength against the obese man straddling him. The strength he had not previously possessed arose from his current pain and hunger. The police officer and the fat man rolled in a bloody knot of limbs down the embankment, simultaneously feeding on each other’s flesh.

The three men and the woman crunched along the gravel in otherwise silence. None spoke for some time, partly through a se
nse of respect for the dead officer, and partly through concern for how Muz might react. It was Amy who broke first, desperately needing to dispel the heavy tension. As she slipped on the loose stones for the third time in what must have been less than a hundred metres, Muz caught her by the arm before she lost her footing completely.

“Thanks,” she said with a forced smile.
“I’ve always been clumsy. My father says it’s ironic that my initials are A and E. Do you get it? As in hospital A and E?”

“Just be careful not
to make too much noise,” was Muz’s only response, his hard expression carved from stone.

With that attempt at conversation cut short, the four weary walkers trod onwards, again without a word being passed between them.

Chapter 7

Zombie Jesus

Emotionally depleted and physically drained, the four survivors continued to push north. The tracks passed across another larger bridge over a road, which Muz recognised as Montrose Avenue. The road beneath was just yet another example of what was becoming an all too familiar scene. Cars and a couple of mopeds littered both the road and the pavements. Bodies robbed of their meat lay amid them, including the remains of a dog. Wandering aimlessly from one corpse to the next, looking for one with still edible muscle on its bones, were those that refused to die. The collective sound they made, their moaning and wailing, was disturbing to hear. The front half of a cat was dragging itself along the white lines of the street towards the nearest cadaver.

“Why are they making that God-awful noise?” Carl asked, as they observed the horrendous scene from the
relative safety of the bridge above.

“Sounds like they’re in pain,” Amy answered.

“Yeah, no shit,” Chuck said, looking at all the horrific injuries those people below were suffering.

“Even the ones that don’t appear badly injured are making the same sound
s,” Amy pointed out.

She was right; those poor people were in terrible pain. As though the agony of their starvation
had not been enough to endure, now, every inch of their bodies burned with the horrible sensation of feeling themselves beginning to rot. Unable to take in the absurd amounts of proteins necessary to facilitate the cellular reformatting the amoeboid cells demanded, the necrosis was spreading through them unchecked.

Seeing their audience above, the afflicted numbers went immediately wild, gathering under the bridge and reaching vainly upward. Their cries increased to an almost deafening pitch, as they yearned to get
their hands on the people up on the bridge and sink their teeth into their meat, their fat, their organs, marrow, and brains. It was both a pitiful and terrifying sight.

“Let’s get out of here,” Carl said to the others, a shiver running down his spine.

“Yeah,” Muz agreed, shaking his head in despair at not having seen any road blocks or cordons of any kind anywhere on the stretch of road.

To their right, the tracks continued to run along the rear of people’s gardens. Though they looked through the windows of the house
s as they passed them by, they saw not a single living soul within. They passed another large area of grass fields on their left, Silkstream Park, and again there was not a single person to be seen, no deranged cannibals and no survivors.

It couldn’t have been more than a mile, though it felt a great deal more, before they found themselves approaching Burnt Oak tube station, which could be seen off in the distance just under the road bridge ahead.

“Okay, we’ve got Watling Avenue and the station coming up,” Muz announced, finally breaking his bitter silence. “That could mean a build-up of people.”

“Watling Avenue? That’s a high street, isn’t it?” Amy asked.

“It’s got shops on it, yes,” Muz told her, “but it’s a far cry from Oxford Street.”

“I need to try and find some… provisions,” Amy said.

“What?” Chuck asked incredulously. “What could possibly be that important?”

Amy didn’t answer.

“It would be extremely dangerous,” Muz told her.

“This man
’s finger needs immobilising,” Amy said at last. “I need to find some strong tape to strap it up.”

“He’ll be fine,” Chuck said adamantly.

“It needs taping,” Amy whined back at him meekly.

“He’s right,” Muz felt pained to admit, still wanting to take out his surging anger on Chuck’s face. “A dislocated finger is the least of our concerns.”

Muz and Chuck turned and continued to walk up the line, while Carl looked nervously back and forth between his injured hand and the paramedic.

“Maybe,” Amy called after them
, “but I desperately need some things as well.”

“What things?” Muz asked, beginning to feel exasperated.

“Just things.”

“We’re going to need a little more information than that if we’re going to hit a high street at a time like this.”

Amy paused again before finally spitting out what she had hoped she wouldn’t need to say.

“It’s my time of the month, okay? I need tampons. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed
, but there’s a soddin’ great stain running down the inside leg of these trousers, and I don’t want to sound disgusting, but I actually think those crazy people can smell the blood. They’re drawn to it. That’s why I was hiding in the ambulance.”

Tears began to well in her eyes and her cheeks flushed with anger.

“Okay, fair enough,” Muz responded, unable to hide the disgust he felt.

“Well, you did ask,” Amy said sulkily.

“Fine. We don’t need any more attention than necessary from those mad bastards, so I guess we’d better get your… things.”

“Are you being serious?” Chuck asked, shaking his head in despair.

In the thick of all that was going on, trust a woman to still want to go shopping, he thought. For a moment, he considered pressing on up the tracks by himself. He knew however that alone, he wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight if he found himself under attack.

“Give me a second,” Muz said and went quiet, while he tried to picture the layout of Watling Avenue and formulate some sort of plan. He paced up and down, kicking absently at the loose stones, while the others watched him and waited.

“So, what’s it going to be, chief?” Chuck finally asked, his patience wearing thin.

He didn’t like the way people naturally gravitated towards the copper and looked to him
to make the decisions, but he thought it best to go along with it all, for the time being at least.

“Amy, you’ve already said that at the minute, you’re like catnip to those psychos,” Muz said
, “and Carl, I imagine you’re going to find it difficult to swing that crowbar for a while.”

Carl, who had been mutely nursing his throbbing hand for some time, nodded glumly.

“So I think it’s best if we find somewhere for you two to hold up, while me and Chuck raid a few shops. That’s if Mr Self Preservation here is willing to do something that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”

Chuck didn’t even acknowledge the goading remark, refusing to bite.

“There’s a church,” Muz went on, with a scowl, “off to the right, on this side of the road, through those trees. It has barred windows and solid wooden doors. If we can get in, that would be the best place to leave you. What do you think?”

“Sounds good,” Carl replied, clearly happy at the prospect of getting himself behind a sturdy locked door.

Chuck just shrugged with resignation and Amy nodded. She felt guilty at sending two of these men out to get what she needed, but she wasn’t going to complain if they were willing to do it.

With their plan decided upon, the group cut across the tracks, carefully avoiding the power rails, still having no clue as to whether or not they were live. Muz thought it would be logical for a number of reasons to switch off the power to the tracks
, but he had no idea what London Underground policy was, or if they even had a policy concerning a situation even remotely similar to this.

Treading down the abundance of stinging nettles by the fence on the other side,
in a concerted joint effort, they managed to climb over the wobbling wire fence. They then fought their way through a densely packed area of overgrown bushes, an unclaimed small piece of land between the rears of several properties. A hop over a low wall, which even Chuck found fairly easy, and they found themselves at the back of the church.

The unremarkable building was in no way the traditional design of a church. There was no tower or spire and the only thing that set the forty year old building apart as a place of worship, from the angle the group approached it, was the banner draped alon
g the long wall facing Gervase Road, which read ‘Jesus saves.’

“He certainly isn’t saving anyone today,” Carl muttered bitterly to himself.

Pushing past the cluster of wheelie bins that blocked their way, the four of them looked suspiciously at the building. The rear door, set at the top of a short flight of steps, was ajar. Obviously, this was a good thing insofar as they would not have to go to the effort of having to try to break in, the noise of which would have probably brought them some unwelcome attention. On the other hand, however, it meant that the building might not be the place of sanctuary they had been hoping for.

Muz had always refused to believe that there were any truly God-fearing people in a shithole end of London like this. Burnt
Oak and Watling Avenue in particular, was one of the more scummy areas on the borough, a hotspot for burglaries, robberies, drugs, shoplifting, the lot. If people ever came here to pray, he thought, it had to be more out of cultural convention, rather than any real piety. But then again, maybe that was just the raging cynicism that only seeing the darker side of humanity as a copper forced upon him.

As the four unlikely companions stood weighing up their options, a fine drizzle began to fall. It was a deceptive type of rain, more of a downward mist that seemed light but was cloying and left you as wet as a downpour.

“We going in?” Carl asked the others apprehensively, shivering against the cold touch of the water droplets tickling the back of his neck.

“I guess so,” Muz responded
but failed to move any nearer to the building.

“How can we be sure it’s safe?” Amy asked.

“We’re just going to have to give it a thorough search,” Chuck told her and took the lead, climbing the stairs.

The others followed hurriedly, Carl frantically scanning the road
adjacent to the church, having inadvertently found himself pushed to the rear. Chuck nudged the door inward and stepped inside, with the rest of the group gathered tight behind him.

The rows of tall windows tracing the two long walls were filthy
, and so, despite the daylight trying to fight its way in, the room they found themselves in remained deeply gloomy. Muz fumbled around the walls by the door until his hand fell upon a light switch. As he flicked it, the florescent strips set in the high ceiling blinked into life.

As Carl stepped inside, he put the door in its frame and hastily secured the two bolt locks at the top and bottom. Chuck looked back at him and frowned at what he was doing. He wasn’t sure that at this stage
, locking themselves in was a good idea. If they found they were not the only people in here, it would only delay their escape. He didn’t say anything though; he knew his standing within the group was more than a little shaky at the minute.

The small hall in which they found themselves was lined with rows
of simple wooden pews. The windows were protected by metal grills, just as Muz had said, and the wooden front door at the far end of the room looked just as solid and sturdy as he had promised. Comfortingly, the huge iron sliding lock that ran horizontally across its centre looked to be more than ample defence from the dangers outside. At the end where they had entered, there stood a raised stage with a table, dressed in a white cloth with white tassels and edging. On top of this, there stood a number of tall gold candlesticks. Overlooking everything, with an expression of either serenity or resignation, was a life-sized depiction of Christ hanging from a crucifix attached to the back wall.

“Okay, spread out and check the other rooms,” Muz said, gesturing to the several doors. “And be careful.”

Carl reluctantly followed Chuck as the big man went to check the toilets and what appeared to be a kitchen area, judging by the view through a serving hatch. Amy scuttled off after Muz, almost treading on his heels.

The latter pair opened a
door, which revealed a downward staircase, descending into blackness. Muz again found a switch on the wall and a single light bulb situated at the bottom of the stairs struggled to illuminate the floor below. The police officer and the paramedic gave each other a look of uncertainty.

“Come on,” Muz said. The words cracked in his throat and came out with a squeak. He wasn’t even embarrassed, so concerned was he for what might be waiting for him below.

Having reached the bottom of the stairs, Amy’s rapid breathing loud in his ear, Muz scanned the low-ceilinged area. The headroom was even more reduced by the number of pipes snaking their way this way and that. Unlike the open hall above, this floor was segmented by a number of whitewashed walls that made it almost maze-like. Muz and Amy peered round each new corner with trepidation, without finding anything more interesting than a complex fuse box and a huge boiler system. Many of the little rooms the walls created were stuffed high with boxes and other items, stored here and probably forgotten about.

Having satisfied themselves that there were no affected people down here, Muz and Amy turned, heading back for the stairs. Unbeknown to them however, from amid one of the piles of boxes, they were being scrutinised intently by a pair of unblinking eyes.

As the man and woman paused by where he lay, to check what the boxes contained
, their observer chose to remain hidden. Though the smell of blood crusted onto the female’s inner thigh filled his nostrils, the alluring odour did not manage to beckon him from his place of concealment. He had managed to catch and eat an unfortunate cat only an hour earlier, and as yet, hunger had not again taken charge of his simple mind.