Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (10 page)

Though the larger woman was easily three times the mass of her attacker, she was able to put up little defence against the little oriental woman
, who began feasting frenziedly on her rolls of fat.

Though he knew there was nothing he could do to help, Muz felt a greater sense of shame with each person he left to their fat
e. Standing on a rusty exercise bike that had long since been put in the garden and forgotten about, he clambered over the fence.

He found himself now back out on the street, the fat woman’s house having been the end of the row.
Across the road and almost out of view around a bend to the left was a parade of shops, the sight of which helped him get his bearings. This was Salcombe Gardens and he was two roads over to the west from where Kieran had met his horrible death.

At the bend by the shops, there were three TSG carriers parked at
haphazard angels on the road. Standing by the vehicles, there were at least ten or twelve police officers, dressed in full riot gear. They didn’t seem actually to be doing anything, just standing there on the road. There were no deranged members of the public to be seen and no sounds of fighting from around the bend.

He was saved, he thought for
a moment, but then his memory replayed for him the all too vivid images of the Herts officers eating Kieran. He had begun to walk over to the TSG officers but now stopped, uncertain of what to do.

He watched them for a distance. They didn’t appear aggressive
, but with the sun reflecting off the visor of their helmets, it was impossible to see their faces. He thought about calling over to them from where he was but then noticed their shields and batons lying on the ground around them. None of the group were making any attempt to pick them up.

Muz’s heart began to thump in his chest
, as he was now well aware that there had to be something wrong with the men. No officer would leave his shield, baton, or any other item of protective equipment just discarded on the road, especially in a situation such as this, where a member of the public might pick them up and use them against the police. Muz began to back away, praying to a God that he didn’t believe in that none of the group would see him.

The cry
of a wailing child cut through the morning air. Without the usual sounds of vehicles and people, the road was solemnly quiet and the infant’s cry could not be missed. It was coming from the flats directly above the shops and almost as one, the police officers turned to look in the direction of the source of the sound.

Breaking their immobility, one of them ran for the stairs at one end of the line of shops and the others soon followed. On the bottleneck of the stairs, they stumbled over one another, biting an
d clawing to get to the front and be the first to reach the unfortunate child.

Muz seized his opportunity and ran in the opp
osite direction. Realising now that it was clearly far too dangerous on the streets to make any further attempt at this time to get back to the nick, he sprinted across the road to the nearest house. His best bet was to find somewhere to hide and await rescue, he decided.

As he reached the door, which stood ajar, he managed to
compose himself a little. Instead of bursting into the building, he stood and listened a while for any sounds within. Hearing nothing, he banged loudly several times on the door with his fist. If there were any mental cases in there, that would surely bring them running. Still there was no sound.

Satisfied that there was probably no
one in the house, he hurried into the hallway and closed the sturdy door behind him, double locking the Yale lock and sliding over the heavy bolts at both the top and bottom of the frame. Feeling fairly safe behind so many locks, he stood there and took a little time to gather his thoughts.

Having seen that windows posed little obstacle to those suffering this spread of cannibalistic hysteria, he knew he had to find somewhere where he would not be found should someone break into the house. The loft, he decided, was his best option.

Running through the hallway, he was about to head upstairs when his eyes looked into the kitchen. Taking a brief detour, he wrenched open the drawers until he found the largest knife. Gripping the wooden handle tightly, he practiced a few swift stabbing motions. A baton may be of little use in a fight against these demented people, but if it came to the crunch, he was sure a bloody great knife like this would stop any attack.

He ran up the stairs and stood on the bannister rail on the landing
, while leaning against a wall. Reaching up, he lifted the wooden panel of the loft hatch and pushed it to one side. Placing the knife in his back trouser pocket and grabbing the sides of the hatch, he pulled himself up. His feet scrabbled furiously at the wall for purchase, while his arms struggled to haul himself up into the darkened dusty roof cavity.

Having managed the climb
, he panted heavily, kneeling over the hatch and looking through and down the stairs, listening for any sounds from the house below. It seemed that no one out on the road had heard the racket he must have made. There were no sounds of anyone trying to get into the house.

Surrounded by darkn
ess, he sat there on the floorboards that the homeowner had laid across a portion of the floor space. He couldn’t decide what to do. It went against his mind-set as a police officer simply to hide here, but what other choice did he actually have?

He had lost
all hope of making it back to the nick on foot. There were just too many people out there, all of whom seemed to have developed an insatiable craving for human flesh. He’d been lucky to make it as far as he had. He felt alone and abandoned by his colleagues, by the people in IBO, by the Command Centre staff, by the fucking Commissioner and the whole police organisation, which was meant to back him up in a critical situation like this.

Reaching into his met-vest
pocket, he pulled out his phone. He pressed a button, which lit up the screen, revealing it to be completely shattered and unreadable. The thing was useless. It was the third phone he had broken this year. Fatima was going to kill him, he thought absurdly.

“Bollocks,” Muz barked as loudly as he dared, tossing the phone aside.

A painful lump tightened in his throat, as he contemplated, in a moment of sullen pragmatism, the possibility that he might not survive this, might not see his wife and daughter’s faces again. He wished he had kissed them both before he had left.

He was able to make out little of his surroundings in the darkness
, and so, instead, his eyes replayed a miserable montage of recent events. Unable to escape the terrible images of gore, he thought of how he might have saved Kieran from his horrific death, how he could have tried to prevent that poor woman from tearing herself open and eating her unborn baby. Thinking only of his own safety, he hadn’t considered for even a second helping that man in the car with his twin daughters. What miserable excuse for man was he? What kind of police officer had he proven himself to be when people needed him the most? One that hadn’t become a casualty and therefore part of the problem, just as he had been trained, he desperately tried to reassure himself but it was cold comfort.

Scuttling over to the slanting interior of the roof, he hacked away at the bitumen-covering underlay with the knife then kicked out a section of the tiles, which made a clattering din
, as they shattered on the driveway below.

Peering through the hole, he had a good view of t
he rooftops and the street outside. Gone now was the dim morning twilight. The sun was already climbing above the line of houses he could see, casting long shadows. Birds were flitting around and chirping with even greater vigour than usual, as though disturbed by the carnage unfolding in the world beneath them. The day had only just begun.

Chapter 3

Jenna

It may have been two hours or more that Muz sat there uncomfortably wedged against the
inside of the sloping roof, staring down at the street. There were long periods of calm, the road below him completely devoid of any signs of life. Now and then though, there came an eruption of madness. At one point, a door across the street flung open and a man burst out into view, having decided to make a break for it. It proved to be a poorly considered decision as within seconds, the police officers in their heavy riot gear, appeared and sprinted after him. Despite the cumbersome weight of their body armour, they were on him in seconds.

The savagery of their attack still astounded and terrified Muz.
Like all those affected by this ensuing insanity, the police officers attacked as a unified group. It seemed then that, although all higher reasoning was lost, there remained in their brains some primitive instinct to work together as a pack, overwhelming their prey.

With so many large men feeding on the lone man, he was rapidly reduced to little more than bare bone and equally inedible cartilage. It was then, when there was n
ot a scrap left to be picked from the human carcass that Muz noticed a dramatic change in the behaviour of the group. Having switched from working together, they now turned on each other with the same vicious ferocity, desperate for yet more meat with which to fill their stomachs. They really were like dogs, not a true pack, but more like wild strays that came together when it worked to their advantage, but were quick to turn on their temporary allies.

Muz hated to watch the massacre but forced himself to do so, aware that learning as much about this madness and how it was a
ffecting people could be the difference between him eventually getting to safety or not.

Once the officers had forced so much meat down their throats that their bloated stomachs threatened to rupture, their behaviour again changed radically. Those that survived the feeding now
became extremely docile. They loitered, staggering around aimlessly or collapsing to the ground. The noise of their loud moaning, in response to the pain of their overstuffed guts, sickened Muz to his core.

They remained in this more sedate state for some time
, burping and farting raucously. Muz was able to see that an officer whose trousers had been torn away in the fight, was shitting all down the back of his legs without the slightest concern. Then beyond the perspective of Muz’s vantage point, another runner caught their attention. Already feeling the pangs of hunger again, desperately yearning for meat, they ran down the street out of Muz’s view.

What i
n God’s name was going on, Muz wondered. What could have possibly caused all these people so suddenly to become violently insane? Was it some kind of chemical warfare? He had heard of the American military in Vietnam testing experimental drugs on their own soldiers, in order to make them fight more aggressively. Was whatever it was airborne, in the water, or did it spread only through direct contact with an infected person? The most pressing question Muz now found himself asking, was would he too, soon succumb to this insanity? He imagined himself gnawing on the body a still living person and a cold shudder raced down his spine, bile welling up in his throat.

It was then that he heard a faint noise from downstairs.
Listening intently, he could hear a low moaning. Someone was in the house. As quietly as he could manage, he crawled over to the opening in the floor, cringing at every creak of the beams, fearing they would give him away.

Peering tentativ
ely over the edge of the hatch, he heard whimpering, as a woman appeared at the foot of the stairs. She slumped down to sit on the bottom three steps, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She appeared distraught, her ponytail bobbing in response to the shaking of her body.

How had she managed to get
into the house without making any noise, Muz asked himself. He would have certainly heard anyone forcing entry through the front door and the front ground floor windows had also been closed. She must have approached the house through the rear gardens, to avoid the chaos on the streets, and come in through the unlocked back door or a rear window. Muz cursed his hastiness to find this hiding place. Why hadn’t he taken just a few seconds to lock the back door?

He continued to watch the woman from above, h
is knees already hurting from kneeling on the beams. Assessing her mental state wasn’t easy, as he couldn’t see much of her from his position. She was moaning quietly into her crossed arms. The sound was the same as that the cannibals had made when they were painfully full to bursting, but it could equally be the sound of despair. She stopped her moaning momentarily, to sniff up a load of snot that had accumulated in her nasal passage. The rest that hung over her top lip, along with abundant tears, she wiped away with the long sleeve of her white hooded top. She was crying then, Muz realised.

The police officer
was trying to summon up the courage to call down to her, still not certain that she hadn’t been affected by the spread of dementia, when there came an almighty crash. The sound, which could have only been that of someone throwing themselves at the front door from outside, caused the woman to scream and scurry backwards halfway up the stairs. Someone out on the street had obviously either seen her through a window or heard her miserable moaning.

There came another loud slam at the door and the
woman continued to scream even louder. Her hands, held in front of her face, shook violently. Again, someone’s bodyweight rammed against the door and Muz heard a crack, as the frame began to give.

“Stop screaming,” Muz shouted down at the woman.

The distressed woman in her late twenties, by the look of her, froze for a second, not understanding where the voice had come from. Then she looked up and saw Muz’s wide-eyed face glowering down at her from within the blackness of the loft hatch. She screamed with such a level of fear now, her throat so tight that hardly any sound escaped her mouth. Snot bubbles erupted from her nostrils and she desperately tried to blink away tears, to stare back up at Muz. Still there came the relentless bashing against the door and the resulting splintering sounds, as it buckled under the onslaught.

“Get up here,” Muz yelled. “Quick.”

The woman didn’t respond, looking up at him with open suspicion and then over at the rapidly weakening front door.

“Come on!”
he yelled insistently.

He heard a snarling then
from inside the house. The person forcing the door had at least managed to get their head through to stare at their next meal. The woman came to her senses and clambered up the stairs, losing her footing twice in her blind panic. The door rattled in its frame and the snarling became more frenzied.

“
Climb on the bannister and grab my hand,” Muz urged.

Shakily, the woman placed a foot on the wooden rail and tried to launch herself upward with her other wobbly
stick of a leg. She was so skinny and bereft of muscle, as the tightness of her jeggings revealed, that she failed to reach high enough.

The front door finally came crashing in now and a madman with a labourer’s build, his arms a mess of bite marks and missing lumps of flesh, came sprinting up the stairs after the woman.
He could literally smell her fear, the perspiration running down her back, the stink of her unwashed armpits and crotch, and it drove him wild.

Normally
, he would not have been consciously aware of the woman’s subtle odours. That was not to say that his senses were now somehow keener. It was simply that the mental affliction he was suffering had shut down most of the higher cognitive processes that normally flooded the human mind. His mind now a blank canvas, his thoughts few and far between, he was much more readily able to take notice of his senses.

Muz lunged dangerously lower out of the hatch, so as to reach further down to the woman, anchoring himself with his feet braced against the beams. The woman l
eapt one last time and now their hands met. Muz almost crushed her delicate fingers in his grip and she yelped in pain. Thankfully, this bag of bones was as light as she looked and the copper was able to haul her up. Still in a panic, the woman reached upwards with her free hand, to grab at anything she could and pull herself up. Her grip found Muz’s hair and his right earlobe.

“Jesus. Fuck,” Muz screamed against the white pain the woman hanging off his ear caused.

He managed to keep his eyes open and saw the madman on the landing now, reaching up to grab the woman’s scrawny legs.

“Kick,” Muz shouted at her. “Kick him in the bleeding head.”

The woman clawing herself up his body began thrashing her legs around in the air beneath her. Several times her feet connected with the hulk of a man’s ugly head but the blows were feeble and had no effect on him whatsoever. Her lower limbs were flicking around like those of a dying spider however, which made it impossible for the enraged madman to get a hold of her.

Eventually
, the woman managed to pull herself up Muz’s body and into the loft. Muz himself however was still hanging precariously head first over the landing. The crazed man, hungry for meat, turned on him now, jumping to grab his head but missed.

Several beads of sweat dripped from Muz’s forehead and landed in the other man’s open mou
th. The taste drove him insane with raging desire and he leapt again, higher this time. Muz managed to pull himself back just in the nick of time, avoiding the grasp of the man’s shovel-like hands. He rolled over and gasped rapidly.

“
Thank you,” the woman whimpered.

She was
already curled up against the wall farthest from the hatch, terrified of the man beneath them, who was growling menacingly, unable to co-ordinate his thoughts enough to figure out how to get up to them.

“My… bloody… ear,” was all Muz could
manage to say.

In his
exhaustion, he neglected to keep his weight on the beams, and without the slightest warning, the ceiling gave under him. Muz’s legs fell through the broken panels. The only reason the rest of him didn’t follow was that he managed grab the lip of the hatch and the beams around him. Before he was able to pull his legs back up though, the man below had him by an ankle, in an unbreakable grip, and yanked him through the hole with one deft tug.

Muz slammed shockingly hard against the bare wood floor of the landing and his lungs deflated. Still gripping his ankle, the man towered
above him, insanity burning in his eyes. Muz emitted a pitiful whooping sound, as he tried to refill his lungs, already feeling dizzy from the lack of oxygen.

His assailant wasted no time and immediately fell upon him. The sudden pressure of the man’s substantial weight pressing down on him only added to Muz’s inability to breath
e. Fighting or even struggling were both pointless, the man was much bigger and stronger than he was. Muz stared up into the crazed eyes of his attacker, that face of animal rage only inches from his own. The man pealed back his lips, crusted with dried blood to bare his teeth, and dropped his head to bite down on Muz’s neck.

  He
didn’t manage to tear into Muz’s throat however, as at that very moment, the copper thrust upwards at the other man’s face with his fist clenched around the large kitchen knife. The blade sank into the man’s eye and ocular fluid ran down the metal. The force with which Muz stabbed at the man meant that the blade did not rest there. The tip of the knife cracked through the bone at the back of the socket, sliced along the length of the optic nerve, and buried itself deep in the brain. It was only the handle of the knife pressing against the man’s cheekbone that stopped the blade pushing any deeper.

With that one brutal, defensive blow, the
fight was finished. The crazed attacker went immediately limp, his remaining eye staring blankly at Muz and his lips hanging limp, drool threatening to drip from them onto Muz’s face. With all the energy he possessed, Muz heaved the man off him and lie there, looking up at the woman, who had been watching tearfully through the loft hatch.

The man beside him was not dead. His arms and legs twitched violently and his head spasmodically beat against the floor. The knife’s hand
le repeatedly thudded on the bare boards.

Muz clambered wearily to his feet and
climbed back into the loft, the woman above helping to drag him up.

“Oh God. What have I done?” he cried. “I’ve killed him.”

The skinny woman just stared back at him through the gloom.

“You’re a copper,” she eventually said with obvious distaste for the word. “Why are you hiding in here? Why aren’t you out there doing something?”

Muz glared back at her now, unable to comprehend her lack of gratitude.

“What? What am I meant to do?
” he demanded to know. “There’s probably hundreds of people like him out there.”

“But you’ve got to do something,” the woman blubbered, snot again tickling onto her lip, her eyes red and sore from crying. She just wanted all this not to be happening. “Someone has to do something.”

“Hey,” Muz snapped back angrily, nursing his swollen, throbbing ear and rubbing at the scratches the woman had given him while climbing up his torso. “I watched my mate get eviscerated today because he got involved in whatever madness is going on out there.”