Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (52 page)

One of the soldiers at last hit their target, and as the boy was gnawing at the mesh, the left side of his face exploded. The remaining half of his head slumped against the windscreen and bashed up and down limply with every jolt of the vehicle.

Still
, the bullets kept coming, answering Muz’s question. A round punctured the front left-hand tyre of the Jankel, causing the rubber to rip away with explosive force. The truck listed to that side, white hot sparks spraying from the rim, and it was all Muz could do to keep it moving in a straight line.

He tore across Canons Corner, going over the roundabout in the wrong direction, and raced down Spur Road. Glowing tracer rounds flashed past them. Only when he swung the truck wildly right, back into the estate, almost hitting the corner of one of the blocks, did the rifle fire stop.

“Holy freaking shit,” Muz panted, as he limped the Jankel back through the estate, forcing himself to drive at a more sedate pace now the danger had passed.

“
You okay?” Chuck asked. He was holding onto the handle above his door with one hand and bracing himself against the dash with the other, his eyes wide with fear.

Muz nodded.

Reaching Salisbury Court, he backed the truck up to the doors, knocked the lever out of gear and applied the handbrake. He then sat there, staring out of the windscreen into the dark, replaying in his mind all that had just happened.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, repeatedly beating the steering wheel.

“Let’s just get inside,” Chuck said calmly.

Muz turned off the ignition and climbed out. Neither he nor Chuck bothered to retrieve any of the food in the rear of truck. They entered the block and pushed the furniture back in place against the doors, without a
single word passing between them. They remained silent, as they made their way wearily up the thirteen flights of stairs.

As the two of
them entered their flat, Tom and Amy, and even her two patients and Digby, came to greet them with happy expectant faces. Taking one look at the grim expressions of the men however, they knew instantly things had gone badly.

“Where’s the other two?” Amy asked, her voice cracking.

Muz just stared back at her.

“No,” Amy whispered.

Muz nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Amy said again. She collapsed to her knees where she was stood and broke down in a fit of tears.

She was an utterly inconsolable sobbing mess. The ex-zombie, Sam, as the group had come to call him, squatted and put his good arm around her in a comforting gesture. Smelling the sweet odour of her skin though, he fought against the urge to bite. Raj watched him intently. His own intellect still battling with such strong urges, he knew exactly what was going through the man's dissonant mind. Sam saw Raj watching him and backed away from the woman, with a look of guilt on his disfigured face.

The TV in the corner continued to blare away to itself, having no concern for the shared remorse in the room.

“In financial news,” a reporter said, “the current exchange rate of the Pound to the Euro and the American Dollar has dropped to a critical low.”

Muz broke then, yelling with unrestrained rage
, and threw his cricket bat at the screen. It shattered and went silent. Digby’s tail disappeared between his back legs and he ran to cower in a corner of the room.

“Are t
hese people fucking serious?” Muz bellowed. “Countless people are dead and they’re musing over the economic ramifications. Bastards. They fucking sicken me.”

“Calm down, mate,” Chuck said gently.

Muz was far angrier now than he had seen him since he had first met the man. He had understandably seen him go through some foul moods, but right now, his face was actually turning purple and he was in danger of bursting a blood vessel if he didn’t control himself.

Amy got to her feet and hugged the copper tightly.

“We seemed to be doing alright for a while,” Muz continued, despite Amy squeezing half the air from his lungs. He felt the need to vocalise his pain. “But things are getting worse, not better. We’re starting to drop like flies. How much longer is it going to be before we’re all dead – or worse?”

Amy sobbed into his shoulder.

Tom, his own expression now one of rage, strode up to one of the living room walls a beat it with his fists, creating cracked dents in the plaster. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He would have been able to protect the old woman and the boy, he thought. He should not have listened to Muz. He should have gone with them. He would have saved them.

Chuck watched the Pole
with growing concern, as he continued to pound the walls with his fists, despite his raw knuckles leaving their bloody prints on the wall with each blow. It seemed like an inhuman disregard for the pain it had to cause him. Was he turning, he wondered. Had something happened while they had been out?

“Stop it!” Amy screamed. “You’re scaring me.”

Tom stopped and leant against the wall, sobbing and muttering to himself in his native language.

Chapter 15

Legion

“How did those kids even get in there?” Chuck asked. “That place should have been closed when the disease first started to spread.”

He and Muz were stood out on the balcony, staring in the direction of the sun rising through the morning mist that clung to the fields. It was raining heavily but the men were sheltered from the torrent by the overhang of the roof just above. The downpour had washed the frost away
, and with the new day already beginning to warm them through, the few remaining cannibals were once more pitifully dragging themselves around the streets below.

The light of dawn had come without any of the few remaining survivors in the shared flat even attempting to sleep. Muz and Chuck’s slumped shoulders
and their half-lidded eyes betrayed their fatigue.

“Yeah, it would have been,” Muz agreed. “But this whole area would have been miles outside the initial police cordons.”

“Even so,” Chuck said, “I can’t believe those people took their kids there when they must have known what was happening over in Mill Hill.”

“People are stupid and naïve,” Muz told him. “The society we live in has made us all soft and too comfortable. People don’t think that anything can actually threaten the safety of the world we’ve built up around us.”

Chuck nodded in agreement. As a soldier, he had seen the world as it really was. If a country wasn’t engaged in conflict with another, it was pretty much guaranteed to be wrapped up in an internal civil war. In the vast majority of the world, individual human lives were considered to be of little consequence. The human rights, the safety and security British citizens enjoyed were not set in stone. They hung tentatively in the balance of the constant global power struggle.

Over past the distant line of the northern perimeter, there seemed to be more helicopter activity than usual today.
Several choppers were touching down in the forward command compound and taking off again with what seemed to be to Chuck a level of urgency, their rotors harassing the branches of the nearby trees. They were gearing up for something, he thought. Maybe the military were finally going to make a push to retrieve the few survivors.

“What’s it been, nine, ten days since all this shit started?” Muz asked absently.

“About that.”

“We’ve not seen any more survivors for a while now,” the copper continued to voice his thoughts.

“No,” Chuck replied. “Not since those hoody kids.”

“I guess by now everyone else has either been eaten or infected.”

“I guess so,” Chuck agreed.

“Which means it’s only a matter of time before we all go the same way,” Muz concluded.

Chuck nodded.

Another helicopter approached the forward command compound. It was a Sea King, Chuck saw. A line of three metal drums had been attached to its belly on either side. Hoses dangled from the containers.

“Shit,” Chuck moaned.

Within the flat, Amy was performing further checks on the two infected but recovering men, anything to take her mind off the loss of her friend, Margaret, and the boy.

Tom sat slumped in an armchair in one corner of the room, staring with desire at a half empty bottle of vodka. The sun was only just beginning to rise and he was already facing the unbearable urge to get blind drunk. He refused to touch the bottle though. He had to regain some semblance of the man he had been before all this had begun.

Without realising he was doing so, Sam pawed at the tiny nub
of gristle around his throat hole with his child’s arm. He could feel small hard things forming within the lump and they were causing him a lot of pain. Having regained his higher mental functions and his sense of self, pain was no longer something that didn’t affect him.

He was on his feet with a book of Sudoku puzzles in his good hand, frantically searching for a pen. When he found one in a kitchen drawer
, he returned to his usual position on the sofa. Amy watched, as he scribbled rapidly at the book, filling in the empty boxes of the puzzle squares. Observing a reanimated undead corpse fill in a puzzle book was just too strange to tear her eyes away from.

Within the space of a
minute, he was close to finishing his third puzzle without fault. Amy regarded the dishevelled work clothes the man was wearing. He had clearly been a skilled labourer at best prior to his demise, not the kind of person she would have expected to possess the level of mathematical deduction he was now exhibiting.

Raj, also s
itting on the sofa, and Digby lying by his feet, were in the middle of a staring contest, each sensing the animal within the other. Digby was the first to look away, backing down in the face of those powerful eyes.

As the neurones of the doctor’s brain continued to knit back together, replacing synapses that had begun to decay and creating entirely new ones at a rapid rate, his cognitive abilities were growing far greater than they had ever been.
He had a clarity of thought he had never before known. His recollection was now close to eidetic, everything he had ever experienced burned indelibly into his memory, available at any given moment for instant recall. He had already decided it wasn’t a gift. It left him unable to escape the horror of what he had done to his poor Kate. He knew that, as long as he continued to live, the crystal clear image of her terrified pleading face would stay with him. He accepted it. Whatever else he might have to endure from this point onward, it was that image that would be his own personal living hell, his punishment for what he had created.

Amy noticed the man’s deep introspection and
the terrible sadness written across his face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Raj failed to respond, continuing to stare at the blank far wall of the living room.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Amy asked again.

When eventually Raj did turn his head to regard the little woman, the guilt in his eyes was heart-breaking for her to look at. Of course, he was going to blame himself for what he had done to his wife, Amy thought, but he really wasn’t at fault.

“I caused all this,”
Raj blurted out.

“What?
” Amy said.

“All this death and suffering, it’s my fault.”

“What he say?” Tom asked, at last distracted from his fascination with the bottle on the table.

Amy glared at Raj
, unable to process what the man was telling her. Sam turned to look at Raj beside him, just as stunned by the admission as the woman.

“What he say?” Tom said again.

“Myself and others like me,” Raj went on. “I am… I was a geneticist. We were conducting research into cellular reprogramming. We had hoped for an answer to rectify and rebuild all injuries, cure all disease, abate and reverse aging. Filled with self-importance and drunk on our achievements, we even dared to think that we might make death itself a thing of the past.”

“A cure for death,” Amy repeated the words incredulously.

“What he fucking saying?” Tom asked angrily. “I not understand. He say he to blame?”

Sam glowered with growing and unchecked malice at the man beside him now. Suddenly and without
warning, he threw himself at Raj with a speed that not only seemed to defy his injuries, but was beyond the ability of a normal healthy man. Raj fell over sideways on the sofa with the weight of Sam’s attack. The mute man, snotty enraged growls coming from his throat hole, beat at Raj with his good hand, while squeezing the man’s nose in the baby fist of his other.

Raj didn’t even try to defend himself. He just lay there, taking the flurry of blows that rained down on him. Though she was still struggling to comprehend what Raj had told her, Amy jumped to her feet and tried to wrestle Sam away from him
, but he was just too fast, too strong.

Hearing the sounds of fighting from out on the balcony, Muz and Chuck came running in, expecting to find their place of safety infiltrated
by cannibal killers. Instead, seeing one ex-zombie punching the hell out of the other, they didn’t have a clue what was going on.

Amy backed away
, Digby barking furiously next to her, his hackles up and his teeth bared. As Raj’s confession began to take root in her mind, she no longer felt the desire to protect him. Stepping forward in her place, Muz and Chuck grabbed the deformed man by his legs and dragged him to the floor. Before he could get up onto his feet, they pinned him face down, sitting on his skinning body, with him bucking wildly beneath them.

“What in God’s name is going on?” Chuck asked, out of breath.

Tom sprung out of his seat then and dove at Raj. He swung a hammer of a fist at his head, which connected with a loud crack.

“What you fucking say?” he yelled. “You do all this?”

Chuck jumped up and pulled him back.

“What the hell is happening?” Muz bellowed.

With Chuck holding him by the shoulders, Tom stared down at where Raj lay on the sofa for a moment then shrugged the tall fat man off him. Sam easily flung Muz off him and the two got to their feet. There was then a long pregnant stand-off.

“Will someone please explain?” Muz asked condescendingly. “Amy?”

“I’m so very sorry,” Raj said, pushing himself back up into a seated position and rubbing at his jaw. It clicked a little on one side as he talked.

“For what?” Muz demanded to know.

A look of fearful realisation crossed Chuck’s face.

“They’re reverting back to the way they were before,” he wrongly concluded, rapidly looking around him for the nearest weapon to hand.

“Tell them what you just say?” Tom ordered, raising a heavy fist at Raj.

With his voice full of regret, Raj did so. Reiterating his admission, he explained about the
medical breakthroughs he and his team had made in research into cures for cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s, cancer, AIDS, all of which had caused them to push recklessly forward with their cellular manipulation.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Muz asked bitterly. “You’re the prick that started this nightmare?”

Chuck’s eyes glazed over, as he became lost in his own thoughts. His mind repeated over and over a small portion of Raj’s monologue – ‘a cure for cancer.’

With his face screwed in
anger, Muz walked over to the wall where the cricket bat was leaning. It had been Carl’s weapon. Poor Carl. The copper picked it up and stood over Raj. His manic eyes brimming with tears, he raised the bat up above his head. The Indian man looked blankly back up at him, accepting the fate he knew he deserved.

“Don’t,” Amy said quietly and with little conviction. She felt like murdering Raj just as much as Muz did. “We still need him.”

Muz just stood there, burning eyes regarding Raj with pure hatred. Eventually, he lowered the bat and flung it at the wall. He then stomped off into the kitchen and leant on the work surface, as far from Raj as he could get.

“So those people aren’t actually zombies then, like these idiots thought? They’re just infected with altered cells?” Amy clarified.

As she got a grip of both herself and the situation, her medical curiosity kicked back in. She felt relieved that she had finally got a logical answer for what was going on and she could therefore reclaim an element of her sanity. This wasn’t just some magical voodoo nonsense.

Raj didn’t respond, his head hanging in shame.

“See, I told you it was stupid,” Amy told Chuck.

“Technically you might call them zombies,” Raj then said with a dry humourless laugh. “
From what I have observed, the cells in their bodies are in a state of flux. Some cells are struggling to fight off the viral necrosis. Others have already succumbed to complete cell death, hence the rotting. Other cells still, in some specimens such as myself, appear to be regenerating. So their bodies are both dead and alive at the same time.”

“Undead,” Chuck said victoriously.

“Shit,” Amy spat out angrily.

Chuck gave the diminutive woman a triumphant smirk that was ridiculously out of place, given their plight.

“But how can they possibly still function with blatantly fatal wounds?” Amy demanded. It was a question that had been burning at her since the beginning.

“That would be the advanced amoeboid cellular autonomy,” Raj told her.

“And again in English,” Chuck said.

“Their bodies are functioning more like amoebas than humans now.”

“Nope, I still don’t get it,” Chuck admitted.

Raj thought for a moment, struggling to put the com
plexities of what he had achieved into simple layman’s terms.

“Pretty much most of the cells in their bodies have developed the ability to fend for themselves, so once vital organs
, are now redundant. The only exceptions to this are the nervous system and the core brain.”

“So what are the chances of stopping it
from spreading?” Muz asked, concern for his family bringing him back into the room.

Raj looked around him at each person in turn, a growing sadness in his inhuman eyes.