Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (8 page)

The emergency vehicle
clipped several parked cars, then veered back across the road and mounted the grass directly in front of him. Muz dived out of its path just in time, as it smashed hard into a tree directly behind where he had been stood.

With the realisation that he had been mere inches from death ringing alarm bells in his head, Muz scrambled back to his feet. The blue lights on top of the em
ergency vehicle were still pulsing but the noise the sirens were now making sounded like the last pitiful wail of a dying cat. He stumbled up to the front of the vehicle and looked in through the driver’s window.

“Oh
, Jesus,” he gasped.

The driver’s airbag had deployed but it hadn’t saved her. A thick, low-lying tree branch had
first pierced the windscreen and then plunged through her skull, causing the woman’s face to implode around it. Muz staggered back, retching in disgust.

The ambulan
ce rocked slightly and there came a clattering crash from inside the back. There was someone alive in there, Muz realised. He ran round to the rear of the vehicle and opened the back door. Instantly, a man, wearing nothing but a pair of shabby underpants, burst out past him and landed in a heap of limbs on the grass.

“You alright, mate?
” Muz asked, approaching him.

Despite the crash and having all but fallen out of the back
of the ambulance, the man was getting to his feet. He seemed completely unconcerned that his right ankle was clearly broken, causing his foot to point outward at an unnaturally wayward and sickening angle. He also had a deep, four-fingered scratch across his chest that had bled profusely.

“Don’t try to get up,” Muz advised him.

The barely dressed man lifted his head and stared with terrible eyes at the police officer in front of him. Muz immediately recognised the inhuman glare as bearing the same madness as the Herts officers had displayed. It was a look that meant in no uncertain terms that the man was about to attack. Remembering the savagery of the other men, Muz didn’t fancy his chances in a one-on-one fight.

He held out the
tiny canister of CS spray, as the man took a step towards him, and fired the noxious liquid directly into his eyes and mouth. Normally, the CS would reduce a person to a blind choking mess in seconds, but it had no effect whatsoever on the injured man. He had been warned back at training school that the spray rarely had any effect on either animals or the insane. After a couple of seconds, the canister spluttered out its last few drops. The copper launched it at the madman and it bounced uselessly off the bridge of his nose.

Muz
then turned and leapt into the back of the ambulance, barely even noticing the woman in her nightdress, strapped to the gurney, or the male paramedic collapsed in one corner with a badly twisted, broken neck. He tried to pull the rear door closed, but the almost naked madman was too quick, thrusting himself in the way. Muz pulled on the handle anyway, slamming the man’s head repeatedly between the metal frame and the heavy swinging door. Only when he heard the man’s head crack did he instinctively stop, shocked by what he had done.

He
’d fractured the man’s orbit. A shard of curving bone surrounding the eye had snapped off and pierced the gelatine orb. The man shrieked horribly in pain, but still, his attempts to reach Muz didn’t stop. As he struggled with the coordination necessary to drag himself up into the ambulance, Muz backed off towards the front of the vehicle, looking frantically all around him for a weapon of some kind.

His eyes fell upon a small fire extinguisher
, clipped to a wall and he snatched it from its mounting. As the man in the stained underwear at last managed to pull himself up and into the ambulance, Muz swung the heavy metal cylinder at his head, deliberately aiming for the already broken eye socket.

The man responded to the blow
by uttering a bizarre squealing sound, like a kettle venting steam, shook his badly wounded head, then lunged again at Muz. The copper beat him repeatedly and mercilessly with the heavy extinguisher, feeling its solid weight in his hand breaking bone. Only when the man’s cranium had been reduced to shattered fragments, stabbing into mulched grey brain tissue, did his attack on Muz come to a stop. His eyes rolled up into the top of his head and he slumped over.

Muz was so knackered by the fight that he collapsed back against the gurney, completely spent of all energy. Each exaggerated breath he drew was so laboured that it came with a rasping snarl. He continued to watch the madman warily. Although he should be completely dead, his hands still clawed slowly and pathetically at the floor of the ambulance
and his jaw continued to weakly masticate.

Something was far from right, Muz thought, as he lay there, struggling to feed his brain with oxygen. He had inflicted horrible
injuries on his assailant and the man should have dropped dead, or at least unconscious, long before he actually did. How could a man, even someone as clearly demented as he had been, sustain such wounds and still continue to fight? Muz had never seen anything like it before. It should have been impossible.

Pulling himself tog
ether and looking around, he became fully aware for the first time of the presence of the two other people in the back of the ambulance. The paramedic was clearly dead, his head twisted so far around that he was facing over the back of his right shoulder. His neck had probably snapped as a result of being thrown across the interior of the ambulance as it had crashed, Muz thought.

The woman in her nightdress, which had
a urine stain in the crotch, was strapped down, lying motionless on the gurney. Her eyes were open and she was regarding him with a complete absence of all expression or emotion. She had probably been conscious and had witnessed the whole terrible fight, Muz thought. For her not to have attempted to wriggle free of her bonds, or even react with a single cry, meant only one thing in Muz’s mind. She was suffering from severe shock.

Her hair was matted with blood. Muz couldn’t actually see a wound amid the mess of knots and clots
, but judging from the amount of her blood alone, had to guess it was quite bad.

“Are you okay?” Muz asked. It was a stupid question, he knew, con
sidering what she had been through, but it was all he could think to say.

The woman simp
ly looked back at him with wide doe-like eyes.

“Okay, let’s get you on your feet and out
of here,” Muz said to her.

Still the woman did not respond. As shaken as he was by everything that had happened, it was only when Muz began to unclip her straps that he noticed the huge bulge of her stomach and the breaks in the tibias and
fibulas of both her lower legs.

“Oh God, no,” he moaned, feeling utterly deflated. “How far gone are you?”

Still the woman didn’t respond. She seemed completely undisturbed by her badly broken limbs, as though she hadn’t noticed her misshapen legs and wasn’t even feeling the pain anymore. She was almost catatonic, her eyes glazed over.

Muz was reluctant to move her now but could hear
, somewhere within the vehicle, a canister filled with compressed gas leaking from its nozzle. He had no idea what the gas was and therefore whether it was flammable or noxious, and so he had no choice but to get the woman out of the ambulance.

Scooping her up into his arms, her
head lolling against his neck, he staggered precariously down the folding steps and out of the back. He could hear her legs cracking, as the broken ends of bone rubbed against each other, and he tried not to think of the additional injuries moving her in this way might be causing. He wasn’t confident he had time to figure out how to operate the ambulance’s hydraulic ramp and lower her out still on the gurney, so carrying her was his only option.

Only when he felt they were a safe distance from the ambulance, should it g
o up in flames, did he lower the woman to the ground, seating her on the curb and leaning her against some metal railings at the side of the road.

Looking up at him with those blank eyes, seeming to comprehend her surroundings momentarily, the woman reached up weakly with one of her hands and attempted to pull Muz’s head down to her mouth. Muz pulled back against her feeble grip. In his experience, it was common for women whom he had rescued from car wrecks or other dangers to want to kiss him but it just wasn’t appropriate.

“You’re going to be okay. I’m going to take care of you,” he assured her.

Leaving her sitting beside the road for a moment, he paced franticly up and down
, trying to gather his thoughts. What the hell was going on? What had caused all those people suddenly to start behaving like animals? There was no point pondering those questions, he thought. He had to concentrate on his more immediate concerns. Getting himself back to the nick, through all this madness, would have been difficult enough by himself. Now there was the added problem of the duty of care he had to this woman.

As he was desperately trying to decide what to do, he failed to notice the woman slump forward,
her head resting limply against her breastbone and her hands slapping the pavement, all signs of life gone.

Simply dragging the wo
man through the streets wasn’t an option, he thought. It would cause untold damage to her legs. He could risk going back to the ambulance, to find a way to get the gurney out the back, he considered. Then he could easily wheel her along. That would slow him down considerably however. Also, should the two of them come under attack from any more people suffering from this spread of psychotic dementia, he would be morally obligated to stand his ground and defend her. That would not be a good situation to be in.

Maybe he would be better off leaving her here. Obviously not just leaving her sitting in the street
, but get her into a house, as a place of relative safety, and come back for her later with back-up. Yes, though it felt like he would be abandoning the woman, this appeared to be his best option.

Behind him, the woman uttered a low moan and he turned to regard her. Her complexion had changed dramatically, her face now a pallid yellow-grey. Her unblinking eyes
, filled with hunger, looked back at him and a trail of drool began to trickle down her chin. She reached out towards Muz with grasping hands, her previous frailty now gone. Muz felt a cold shudder course down his spine.

It looked as though she
was about to start dragging herself towards him, but instead, turned her head down to regard her bloated stomach. The baby inside her was kicking and she contemplated the sensation with the almost comical uncomprehending fascination of a dog caught out by one of its own farts. Baring her teeth, she gripped the fabric of her nightdress and ripped it open, revealing her naked body. Without a second’s hesitation, she then began to claw at herself, her nails raking at her swollen belly. Testament to her newfound strength, she rapidly tore into the skin, blood coursing out of the wounds and pooling in her lap.

“No…” was all Muz c
ould say, stunned by the woman’s intense self-mutilation.

He ran a few steps over to her, planning to pin her down, but she shot him a look so terrifying it stopped him in his tracks. She gnashed her
teeth at him momentarily then returned to her effort to tear herself open. All Muz felt able to do now was stand and bear witness to this sick scene.

The woman’s fingers were soon deep within the gouge she had managed to open up
, and then with a scream of agony and the sound of ripping flesh, her stomach burst open. Even more blood and now amniotic fluid flooded around where she was seated, as she lifted from within her gaping abdominal cavity the writhing form of her baby.

Torn from the warmth and security of its mother’s womb, the
newborn squealed shrilly with the full strength of his tiny lungs. Already, he managed to open his little eyes, and squinting against his first sight of the rising sun, stared up at his mother’s face - just as she lifted him to her mouth and bit viciously into his plump round belly.

The baby’s screeching became even more unbearably high in pitch but the mother
, showing absolutely no maternal concern, continued to feast on his just ripe flesh. Although completely new to the world and already suffering unimaginable agony, the baby was grasping at his mother’s face with his stubby fat hands, as she crunched through his fragile ribs. With a rabid ferocity, the baby now attacked his mother, attempting to chew off her nose with his wet, gummy mouth.

Muz’s backed away,
the image of what he was seeing burning itself indelibly into his memory, threatening to haunt his nightmares for years to come, should he manage to survive and escape the ensuing horror.

Well, that solved the problem of taking care of the woman, he thought with
the macabre sense of humour, which served police officers as a necessary defence against the horrors they saw on a regular basis. At the same time, he doubled over and vomited over the toes of his well-polished shoes, feeling himself again shaking in shock.

“Sam?” he called up over his radio, still tuned to the IBO channel.

“Go on, mate,” the disembodied voice of his colleague replied.

“What in God’s name is going on down here?
” Muz demanded to know. “I’ve just watched a woman rip her unborn baby out of her stomach and eat it.”