Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (15 page)

Suddenly, the pensioner’s
hand grabbed at her with lightning speed, taking a firm hold of the dirty white arm of her hooded top. She screamed loudly and with a pitch that was painful to Muz and Carl’s ears.

The two men came clambering back to where Jenna was fighting the man, who was trying
forcibly to drag her in through the car window. The woman could feel the ice cold of his clawing hand, even through the material of her sleeve.

Having been sat there in the driver’s seat
, with the windows open and exposed to the elements the whole night, the thin wrinkled man was as freezing to the touch as any of the cars crammed along the road. He was very elderly, easily in his eighties, and should have exhibited the frailty that came with such an age. He was far from weak however.

Mu
z and Carl grabbed Jenna’s free arm and tried to wrench her from his grip. The copper wracked his extendable baton and savagely beat the old man’s arm with it, but he didn’t respond to the pain, other than growling with more venom. The woman flopped around like a rag doll between the three men, until Muz and Carl’s combined strength managed to break the old geezer’s grip.

“Did you have to scream?” Carl said angrily.

The old man in the car was gnashing his teeth at them, his spit flying everywhere. He was frantically trying to pull himself through the open car window, to get at them, but his seatbelt was on and he clearly no longer possessed the basic intellect necessary to undo it.

“Did I h
ave to scream?” Jenna repeated incredulously. “Is this guy for real? That old giffer was trying to shagging eat me.”

“W
e can’t afford to make any sound,” Carl told her. “I’ve seen how those crazies respond to noise. You’ll bring them running.”

“He’s right,” Muz agreed, staring at the mad old man and trying to gather as much information as he could about his mental state.

The saggy skin of the pensioner’s
leathery face had a drained white-yellow hue to it, a bloodless complexion that Muz had only ever seen before on the dead.

Jenna scowled and stomped off. Carl went after her and eventually so did Muz, managing to break his fixation with the old man’s enraged and uncoordinated thrashing. Standing on the roof of a four-by-f
our, they pulled themselves up the seven-foot fence that ran the length of the central reservation.

As Muz was straddling the barrier, he caught sight of movement up the road. To his utmost despair, he saw a crowd of people making their way towards them
through the car cluttered dual carriageway. Jenna’s fearful cry had attracted them, just as Carl had warned. Weaving around and climbing over the abandoned cars, they were reacting as any predators would, having heard an animal in distress.

On seeing Muz, standing out like a sore thumb sat high on the fence, as one
, the crowd broke into a run towards him, literally tripping over one another to reach him.

The cannibals were prone to eating the fleshier parts of those they attacked and consequently, many in the advancing crowd had had the flesh of their buttocks almost completely eaten away. Having been stripped of the necessary muscles to do so, they found it impossible to stand upright and instead scurried forward on all fours. Their broken and bleeding knuckles left trails of blood on the car bonnets and
roofs, as they leapt from one to the next. Rather than slowing them down, their disability that forced them to propel themselves along on both arms and legs, actually made them faster and they left the bipeds of the murderous horde behind.

Muz tore his eyes from the crowd and looked
over at the far side of the dual carriageway. A wall, about nine feet high and comprised of vertical metal risers with horizontal concrete slabs slotted between them, stood between the road and the next stretch of green parkland.

Both Jenna and Carl had also seen the onrushing mass of hungry madmen and were wasting no time in jumping from on
e car to the next in a desperate effort to cross the remainder of the road.

As he
jumped onto a car roof, Muz heard a frenzied banging from within the vehicle. The sudden noise, so close as it was, startled him so badly he faltered mid-stride and fell into the gap between this and the next car, cracking his head hard on the ground. Trying to shrug off the pain and get back up, he could hear the snarling and growls of the crazies, as they drew rapidly nearer. Climbing over the remaining vehicles that blocked his way, he reached the wall.

Carl was already sat
on top of it, reaching down to Jenna, who was failing badly in jumping high enough to reach his offered hand. Muz bent and hugged her around the hips, lifting her off the ground. She grabbed at Carl’s hand, almost pulling him off balance. Though he pulled at her with all the strength he had in him, Carl couldn’t lift her high enough for her to grab the top of the wall. He looked nervously over his shoulder at the racing crowd that were snapping at each other with uncontrollable blood lust. They had ten more seconds at best, before the massing attackers were on them, he hastily estimated.

“Bugger this,” he said angrily and dropped back down to the ground on the road side of the wall.

“What are you doing?” Muz asked.

“Just grab her sodding leg,” Carl told him.

Muz copied the man in wrapping his arms around her upper thigh and, together, they hoisted her up with ease. Jenna at last managed to grab the top of the wall. The two men didn’t wait for her to pull herself up; there was no time. Instead, they jumped and simultaneously pushed her up by her buttocks, causing her to sail clean over the wall, and they heard her land with a thud on the other side.

As the raging madmen were practically on top of them, Muz and Carl took a few lon
g strides back from the wall, then ran at it as fast as they could. Knowing they would not be given a second attempt, they grabbed the top and pulled themselves up, kicking frantically with their feet to assist their labouring arms.

Carl was nearest the onrushing crowd and, as he had almost pulled himself over, the fastest of the crawlers with no arse cheeks stretched up and grabbed him by the foot with a grip so strong it almost tore
the ligaments in his ankle. He screamed with both pain and terror.

Still struggling to get over the wall himself
and wishing he’d had time to shed the weight of his stab vest, Muz glanced over at Carl and saw his predicament. Swinging his legs sideways, he delivered a size ten Magnum work boot to the face of the half-eaten attacker, sending a tooth clattering across the road and dislodging the madman’s grip.

Finally
, the two of them dragged themselves over the wall and collapsed in the bushes on the other side. As exhausted as he was, Carl began laughing hysterically and tears of relief welled in his eyes.

“Thanks,” Jenna said, standing over them,
and handing Carl the crowbar he had already thrown over.

They could hear the enrage
d horde gathering mere inches away but felt relatively safe, with them on the other side of the solid concrete barrier. As Jenna was helping Muz to his feet however, several grasping hands reached through a bush and frenziedly pulled at the police officer’s clothes. Wrenching himself free and staggering away from the wall, he now saw that one of the horizontal slabs had a large section missing, allowing the snatching hands to reach through. Though the crazies were doing their upmost to push their way through the hole, it was thankfully too small.

The
head of a young blonde woman managed to poke through, among the arms however. Staring into wild inhuman eyes of the demented woman, Muz’s fatigue, hunger and fear finally got the better of him.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he screamed at her.

The bedraggled woman continued to snap her jaws in the fantasy of masticating on him. Her failing to respond to his question had nothing to do with her lips having almost been torn from her face, now flapping uselessly around her chin. It also had nothing to do with her having had her tongue ripped out of her mouth and eaten.

“Can you even unde
rstand a word I’m saying?” Muz asked her.

“Apparently not,” Carl answered in lieu of the woman responding.

He walked up to the protruding head and bent over, daring himself to get as close as possible, in order to scrutinise her. His tantalising proximity drove the crazy woman to struggle harder, trying to worm her way through the hole.

“Don’t antagonise her,” Jenna warned Carl nervously. “Let’s just get moving.”

  “It’s okay,” Carl replied. “She can’t get through.”

As he said this, the broken concrete on either side of the hole gave way with the weight of the crowd on the other side. The two pieces of broken slab fell out of position and for a second it looked as though the woman was going to fall through with it. With nothing to support them now though, the rest of the slabs above suddenly dropped down, filling the gap and decapitating the woman.

“Holy…” Carl shouted, jumping back in shock.

The severe
d head tumbled onto the grass and Jenna turned away, holding a hand tight against her mouth. To Muz and Carl’s utter disbelief, the head continued to look at them, eyes flicking from one man to the other. Her teeth were still gnashing violently, though now she was silent, her snarls having been cut short with the crushing of her larynx.

As disgusted as he was, Muz could not look away. He had heard
somewhere that a disembodied head could live and remain conscious for up to twenty seconds, but knowing it and seeing it for himself were two very different things.

“Please, can we go?” Jenna begged.

The three of them turned away and headed across the open field, which, unlike the others so far, took a distinct decline.

“Oh God, I think I’ve shit my pants a little bit,” Carl announced, picking at the seat of his trousers.

Muz was astonished at himself for being able to crack a small smile, in reaction to the man’s unnecessary honesty and Jenna’s expression of disgust at his announcement.

“You think that was bad?” Muz asked him. “You should try being attacked by man-eating horses.”

“Wait, what?” Carl replied incredulously. “You were attacked by a horse?”

“Three horses,” Jenna corrected him
, “all as crazy as those people.”

They made their way
down the shallow downward slope of the field and were thankful for the decline, which aided their weary feet in maintaining their momentum. It was nowhere near the stretching expanse Mill Hill Park had been, and they soon reached its end. Here they met a sharp bend in the road that Muz knew to be Flower Lane. They could see houses off along to their right and a small industrial estate directly across the road. To their left, there was nothing but a junction with another road.  Both Jenna and Carl were grateful when Muz led them left, away from any buildings.

Only one abandoned car could be seen on this short stretch of the tightly arcing road. Muz knew from experience that, driving from the right, the left-hand bend was hidden from view by the houses and the right-hand bend that immediately preceded it. It was clear that the driver of the abandoned car had come into the turn far too fast, as many had before him, and he’d lost control. The severely adverse camber didn’t help matters, meaning that the car’s tyres had little grip when it was needed most.
It was for these reasons that the blue Yaris in front of them now was balanced on its roof.

“I don’t suppose you’ve hear
d anything about what caused all this?” Muz asked Carl, finally conceding to engage him in conversation, as they checked out the upturned town car. “The mortally wounded turning cannibal and running riot in the streets, I mean. Just in case you weren’t sure what I was referring to.”

Carl eyed the police officer with suspicion. Was there an insult hidden somewhere in what he had just said, he wondered.

“No, officer. I was hoping you might know something, you being the law,” he replied.

Just then, a black Audi TT RS came caree
ning down the hill and round the bend in the road. The driver didn’t see the Yaris and the three people in the middle of his path until the last second. Though he swerved dramatically to avoid hitting them, the front bumper of the Audi clipped the Yaris, causing it to spin on its roof, almost hitting the three stood only a few feet away. With the driver overcompensating for the impact, the Audi mounted the kerb and drove into the field, before finally coming to a stop. Still the driver tried to get it going again and its wheels span in the wet soft earth, as they tried to find traction.

“Can no
one on this sodding borough drive?” Muz asked, his nerves shaken yet again.

A black man
in his mid to late forties, with a heavy, muscular build and protruding gut, stepped out of the car. His face, the entire front of the shirt and the trousers he was wearing were caked in muddy water. His hair and the back of his clothes were smeared with soot and oil. He looked a mess. Looking down at the Audi’s rear wheels, he saw they had become entrenched in the dirt.

“Fuck,” he shouted and glared angrily at Muz, Jenna and Carl. “Look what you’ve done.”

“What?” Carl responded.