Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

Barely daring to breath
e, Muz franticly tried to assess exactly from where the sound had come. There came another pained moan. It was closer than the first had been, Muz realised. He grabbed Jenna by an arm and dragged her off, taking a route as far afield from the tormented cries as possible. He could feel the welling temptation in Jenna to run but he reined her in. If they ran, their footfalls would make too much noise on the road.

Desperately hoping that he still knew where he has going, Muz pulled Jenna into a wooded area and they wove as fast as they
could through the undergrowth. Thick brambles, which came up to their thighs, snagged at their clothes and scratched their legs. He kept his ear cocked over his shoulder the whole time, trying to hear whether that chilling groan was following them.

They reached the edge of the trees and found themselves stepping out o
nto a road. The mist, it became apparent, had been confined to hovering above the moist fields of the cemetery and they could now see a fair distance in both directions.

Scanning both up the steep hill to the right and down to the left, they were gra
teful that there was not a single soul in sight. There was however, down by the entrance to the cemetery and at a junction, a police car, its blue lights still spinning, though very slowly as the battery was dying. Red and white cordon tape, which had been pulled across the road, was now broken and flapped in the weak breeze, hanging from the lampposts where it had been tied.

On the far side of the road, affluent-looking detached houses were set far back in their own grounds. Directly across from them though, there were no buildings, only anoth
er short stretch of wooded area, with a dirt path running through it.

Muz thought he heard the faint snap of a twi
g behind them. Someone was following them through the trees then, he decided. He frantically urged the reluctant Jenna out from the cover of the trees onto the open road.

“That path over there should lead onto the fields,” Muz said, already hurriedly making his way in that direction.

“But what about a car?” Jenna said, stopping in her tracks. “We’d be much safer in a locked car and we’d get to the police station a lot quicker.”

She began to walk down the hill towards the cars parked alongside the pavement.

“Are you serious?” Muz called after her in his loudest whisper. “What are the chances of finding a car with the keys in the ignition?”

“What about that police car?” Jenna asked over her shoulder, trying the car door handles as she walked past them.

She had a point, Muz was forced to concede. In whatever melee had taken place here, the officers that had abandoned that car may well have left the keys in the ignition in their panic. He broke into a trot to catch up with her.

As they neared the patrol car, he saw several items of po
lice uniform strewn on the ground. There was a clip-on tie, covered in dirt. An epaulette hung from a bush. He couldn’t even hazard a guess as to who it belonged to, as two of the silver shoulder numbers were missing. Then, almost hidden underneath the marked car, he saw a police radio. As Jenna clambered into the empty vehicle, checking the ignition and the sun visor, he scrabbled under it and retrieved the radio.

“Shit,” Jenna said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Muz removed the battery from the discarded radio, placed it in his own and tried to turn it on. Nothing. It was completely flat. He slumped against the side of the car.

Assessing the scene here, the items of uniform, the broken tape, the abandoned car, it was easy to see that this cordon point had been just as ineffective as his own had been. He remembered what the reporter on the TV had said about new cordons encompassing a much broader area. He just hoped that they consisted of something more than plastic tape
and officers who were simply not trained to deal with anything of this nature or scale.

“We can’t hang around,” he told Jenna dejectedly. “We need to get off the roads.”

She climbed out of the driver’s seat and began to walk further down the street.

“There must be at least one car…” she began to say but her words faltered
, as she reached the junction and stared into the new road.

Watching her, the hair on the back of Muz’s neck stood on end.

“What’s wrong?” he asked but the woman didn’t respond.

Although his instincts told him to turn and run up the hill, he instead walked around the car and towards Jenna.

“Get back here,” he hissed.

As he reached her and took hold of her unbelievably fragile wrist,
he too looked into the east end of Wise Lane. There he saw a male and female police officer, both fighting with each other, while picking over the remains of a dead child.

“Oh God, is that John and Sheena?” he asked rhetorically, his brain refusing to accept that he was seeing two good police officers, whom he knew well enough to chat to, committing this atrocious act.

Sheena was trying to feed, but the chunks of flesh, which she tore from one of the poor boy’s thighs, only fell through the gaping hole in her neck when she swallowed.

John was struggling even
to swallow. The majority of the skin on one side of his face had been chewed off, including his lips and cheek, which meant the meat in his mouth kept slipping out. He had developed a technique however, of pushing the meat into his mouth and down his throat with a fist. He had been doing this, with such disregard for his own wellbeing that he had accidentally punched out his two upper front teeth. His stomach was so bloated that it bulged out from under the bottom of his stab vest. A couple of the lower buttons on his blood-soaked white shirt had popped off, with the strain of his incredibly engorged gut.

The fight between the two psychotic officers was completely one-sided. John was too slow from being so stuffed, moaning at the pain of
his tearing innards, while Sheena possessed the speed, strength, and determination that came with her consuming starvation. As the pair clawed and snapped at each other, John’s eyes caught the two pieces of fresh meat observing them from back at the junction. He snarled and began to make his way towards them.

Seeing this, Muz stepped back in fear, while Jenna remained rooted in shock to the road. He needn’t have worried however. Sheena, having not seen her audience herself, took immediate advantage of John’s distraction. She bit firmly down on what to her
, at that moment, was his most attractive feature, the huge bag of meat that was his stomach.

With her jaw clamped down, she tugged at him with the weight of her body behind her, pulling him off balance and tearing him open. The flesh, organs, fingers and toes of five different people spilled out onto the road and into the gutter.
Sheena fell upon the mess of human pieces and returned to frenziedly trying to feed herself, while john floundered, dragging himself along the ground in an effort to reclaim some of his lost bounty.

Jenna was physically shaking now and Muz had to drag her away, back around the corner and out of view.

“Did you see that female officer?” Jenna stammered. “Her throat. How is she still standing?”

Muz continued to pull her away up the hill but she grabbed hold of his shoulders and stared imploringly into his eyes, tears streaming down her filthy cheeks.

“How is that possible?” she asked hysterically.

“I… I don’t know,” Muz said, feeling as equally stunned and disturbed as she clearly was.

Whatever it was that had affected all these people, it was more than just a mental condition, he now realised. Sheena was walking around with what was indisputably a mortal wound in her neck. What possible affliction could enable such a thing to happen?

Muz broke into a run, desperate to get back into cover. Jenna’s free arm flapped pathetically behind her, as he tugged her along in tow
, back to the point where they had first emerged out onto the road. Finding the dirt track again, they ducked under the low branches, into the woods. Only when they re-emerged on the other side of the trees, into an un-mown field of common ground, did Muz respond to Jenna leaning back in protest, and slow back down to a walk.

Jenna wriggled her arm free grumpily and breathlessly looked around her. The mist that had haunted the cemetery was back, hanging heavy just above the long grass.
The dirt path continued ahead of them through the field, meaning they didn’t have to get wet trudging through the dew-soaked grasses.

Working as a police officer rarely brought Muz to places such as this. It was therefore easy for him to forget just how many green areas there were here in north London, hidden from the view of the roads by houses and other buildings.

There were no animals to be seen or heard. Normally walking along through a common field such as this, with the woods gathered in close on either side, a person would disturb some fauna or other, causing it to at least be heard scurrying off through the undergrowth. Jenna and Muz heard no such sounds. It was as though nature knew what a terrible event was taking place and all the animals had gone into hiding, even more fearful of humans now than they normally were.

As they trudged onward
, both their minds replaying the horror they had just witnessed. Their heads swivelled from side to side, their eyes intently watching the woods for any movement. They passed over a thin brook that ran through a pipe, as it intersected their path. Then the track led them through a meagre line of trees that formed the perimeter between this and a new field that was much the same. The only difference was that the woods to their left were now, disconcertingly, only a few metres away.

If someone were hiding among those trees, Jenna worried, and they came running out at her, she would have only a second or two to react.

Off to their right and at a distance at the far edge of the field, there stood a huddle of horses, heads bowed low to the ground, either ignorant to, or unmoved by Muz and Jenna’s sudden arrival. It wasn’t the most pressing thought in either Muz or Jenna’s mind but they both found themselves briefly wondering what the animals were doing out here, wandering free. There must be a neighbouring private field nearby, the gate of which had been left insecure, Muz concluded.

He had been to several calls in the past
, concerning both horses and cows loose in the streets. It was something friends of his, who worked in more central boroughs, found nothing short of hilarious.

In the
miserable sky above them, with the absence of all other sound, they could hear the sound of helicopters. They managed to catch sight of one, through the canopy to their left. On its side, they were able to see the logo of a news network. As it scanned the ground beneath it for any areas of on-going violence, or any other striking newsworthy images, the helicopter came and passed directly over their heads.

Muz and Jenna jumped up and down, waving their arms around frantically. The pilot saw them and responded, moving in closer above them
, until the downdraft from the rotors beat the grasses flat. As it hovered no more than fifty feet above them, it turned side on and they could see a cameraman leaning out the sliding side door and focusing a huge lens on them.

Thinking they were saved, the pair on the ground continued to jump up and down in exhilaration and relief. Jenna jumped on Muz, wrapping her arms around his neck and almost throttling him. But, as they watched, the cameraman
gave a thumbs-up to the pilot. The helicopter then gained altitude again, banked away and was gone over the trees.

“Why didn’t they rescue us?” Jenna asked
, after a minute of standing and staring up at the treetops, her bottom lip beginning to tremble.

“It’s not their job,” Muz responded with a cold, matter-of-fact manner that did not convey his anger.

Though the helicopter could have easily landed in this field, he should have known that it wouldn’t do so. The press never got involved in helping those caught up in the tragedies they were so eager to film.

He remembered
how, it must have been a couple of years ago now, he had been at a protest in Parliament Square. The crowds of protesters had become violent, attacking the police cordon. In the overwhelming rush, he’d become briefly separated from the rest of the line and found himself knocked to the floor.

There had been several members of the press stood right next to
him, who could have easily helped him to his feet. Instead, they had just continued to film, sticking the camera right in his face, as he got the kicking of his life. It had seemed like ages before his colleagues found him and dragged him to safety. After that, Farah had persuaded him to hand in his level two public order training ticket.

“Come on,” Muz said and they continued along in self-pitying silence.

Though her head hung despondently so she was looking at her feet, Jenna caught sight of movement in her peripheral vision. Her heart began to race, even before she had flicked her head up, to look over the field to her right. She needn’t have worried, she thought, as she saw it was just the horses. The huge but docile beasts had been disturbed by the helicopter, and on seeing the two humans that now shared their field, were ambling over to take a look.

Desperate to block out the pain in her stomach, the pictures in her mind of the two officers eating that child, and her general feelings of hopelessness and despair, Jenna made an effort to engage Muz in conversation.