Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (17 page)

After the copper’s reprimand, they walked in silence a little longer.

“You got a phone on you?” Carl then asked Chakamunda
.

“No,” he replied gruffly.

“Why not?” Carl asked.

Chakamunda stopped in his tracks, blocking Carl’s path and glowered at the smaller man.

“Why don’t you?” he asked aggressively.

Carl, looking nervous, didn’t respond. The big man snorted at him, turned away and carried on walking. Carl allowed himself to drop back a little.

A short distance further along the motorway, Jenna stopped suddenly, pointing to their right.

“Look,” she said. “There’s a gap under the fence over there.”

The others followed her line of sight and saw she was right. A shallow ditch had been dug out directly under the fence. It meant they should be able to squeeze under and through, to the train line that lay between them and the police station further along Grahame Park Way.

“Must have been dug out by a fox wanting to expand its territory,” Muz told the others. “You’d be surprised how many there are
around here. I see a lot of them wandering the streets when I’m on nights.”

Jenna was the first to wriggle through the gap and she did so with
the ease of a ferret. Muz and Carl followed, dragging themselves through the cavity in the dirt. Chakamunda, the only person now still on the motorway side of the fence, simply stood looking down at what, to him, was no more than a divot.

“Come on,” Muz urged him. “Your suit’s already ruined.”

“You know that’s not the issue,” the fat man replied, glaring at the officer.

“We’ll help you through,” Jenna said.

“I don’t need help,” Chakamunda said miserably, dropping to his hands and knees and feeding himself through the gap.

As suspected, at the point where his stomach pushed under the fence, he got wedged in and no amount of scrambling with his hands and feet
could cause him to budge another inch.

“Can’t… breath
e,” he gasped, the bottoms of the metal uprights jabbed firmly into his belly.

Muz and Carl grabbed an arm each, while Jenna took hold of the collar of his shirt, and together they began to tug him through.

“Get the… f… off… m..,” the trapped man tried to shout but the pain of the burred metal dragging against his gut cut off his words.

With a final dramatic yank, his girth slid free of the fence and his three help
ers fell backwards into the gravel that lay beside the train tracks. Passing a hand through the tattered rips in his shirt, the black man nursed the raw and bloody scrapes running down his gut and muttered profanities under his breath.

“
I wasn’t always this out of shape,” he moaned, in lieu of a thank you, while coughing uncontrollably and getting to his feet. “Used to be able to keep up with the best of them. Most people call me Chuck, by the way.”

“Chuck? Now that I can manage,” Carl replied with another broad grin. In this miserable situation, he was taking every pleasure he could get from not having to be the politically correct drone that corporate policy insisted on. “So, what do you know about zombies?”

“What? Oh, so because I’m black I know all about zombies,” Chuck replied, immediately flying off the handle.

“What? What’s you being black got to do with it?” Carl asked, genuinely confused by the man’s sudden indignation.

“Zombies. Voodoo. Black,” Chuck spat back.

“Hey, it’s you who’s been using the ‘Z’ word,” Carl said defensively. “I thought you might know something we don’t.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“What about films?”
Carl asked.

“What?”

“Do you remember anything about zombies from films?” Carl clarified. “You must have seen a few zombie films in your time.”

“Is this guy serious?” Chuck asked, turning to Muz. “This is real, not some stupid fucking film. Fucking idiot.”

“I was only asking,” Carl replied.

Chuck kissed his teeth in disgust at the man and turned to walk along the train tracks. Muz shook his head at Carl,
and then he and Jenna too headed off down the lines.

“What?” Carl protested sulkily, walking behind them.

The loose scree made walking without slipping difficult for Carl in his hard-soled shoes. Jenna in her pink and white trainers and Muz in his Magnum boots did not have the same issues. In strange contrast to the suit he was wearing, Chuck too was wearing heavy boots. Above their heads ran the power cables for the trains. Jenna looked up at them, in response to their constant faint buzzing.

“Do you think the trains have been stopped as well?” she asked Muz. Walking along the train tracks went against some deeply ingrained survival instinct and she kept looking back, imagining she had heard a train approaching.

“Long since,” Muz responded.

“Must be causing mayhem for all the commuters in central,” Carl said.

“Oh, those poor bastards,” Chuck replied.

They passed near Pentavia
Retail Park on the other side of the M1, marked by the unmistakable looming arc of white metal beams, a futuristic piece of artwork used unashamedly to support billboards that hung over the motorway.

At this point, a pedestrian tunnel passed under the train line from Grahame Park Way and continued as a footbridge over the road, leading to the retail park. The passing group saw, hanging
side by side from that footbridge, suspended by theirs necks from knotted bed sheets, the two lifeless bodies of a young man and woman. For that couple, suicide had been clearly preferable to being eaten alive. None of the four people passing by below acknowledged the morbid presence of the swingers by talking about them.

“Movies and voodoo aside,” Muz said to Chuck, in an effort to divert his own attention from the corpse
s above. “You did spend the night surrounded by those crazy people though. Is there anything you learned about what has happened or their behaviour that might help us?”

“No,” Chuck answered, still feeling annoyed by Carl’s questions, but he conceded to elaborate. “All I know is they’re gathering in larger and larger groups. I drove down one deserted street after another without seeing a single person
, then, bam, I found myself facing a whole crowd of them and had to plough my way through.”

“Plough your way through?” Muz repeated the man’s words, concerned by what they implied.

“You’ve seen what they’re like,” Chuck responded defensively. “I had no choice.”

The train tracks followed the stretching arc of Grahame Park Way, which ran along at the bottom of the slope to their right. All that stood between them and that road was a flimsy w
ire mesh fence. It did not look as though it would stand up well against a massing attack and this made the four walkers nervous.

Muz’s own particular worries were only compounded by his realisation that they were now no more than a couple of hundred metres away f
rom Colindale police station, yet, they had still not reached the current outer cordon of the quarantined area. He felt desperate, after all he had been through, finally to reach such a barrier and escape all this madness.

As he and the others passed by
the junction of Grahame Park Way and Corner Mead down to their right, they saw a single man staggering along the latter road, struggling under the deadweight of the girl he was carrying in his arms. His hair was unwashed and slick with grease, his face bore two-day old stubble and tear tracks cut their way through the dried blood on his cheeks. He wore nothing but a pair of dirty white Y-fronts and a black heavy metal T-shirt. When he opened his mouth and shouted out to no one in particular, they realised it was not just the burden of the blood-soaked girl that was causing him to buckle and sway as he walked.

“Come on then, you mental bastards,” he yelled, slurring the words, his voice heavy with inebriation.

The volume of his booming challenge in the otherwise empty air and the stench of blood brought many assailants emerging from between the residential blocks of the estate. Seeing the gathering crowd, as one, Muz and the other three with him ducked down and hid behind a group of birch saplings.

As the growing number of flesh-hungry attackers converged on where the drunken man now stood, he bent and deposited the dead girl in her filthy
nightdress on the ground at his feet, as gently as his state of intoxication would allow. Drawing a hammer from where he had slung it from his belt, he swung it wildly at those leading the murderous advance. Despite being drunk beyond all coordination, he managed to land a few lucky blows.

The four hidden observers winced in unison
, as they heard the bone-splintering crack of that hammer caving in a man’s skull, causing him to drop mid-stride and hit the road face first with an equally sickening smack that burst open his nose and dislocated his jaw. Though he was no longer any threat, other attackers strode over him, treading his head further into the tarmac, to reach the valiantly and furiously fighting man.

“Shoul
dn’t we try and help him?” Carl asked the others.

Neither Muz nor Jenna voiced any response.

“You can go try if you want,” Chuck answered the man.

Carl however
made no move to go the man’s assistance and remained cowardly hidden with the others.

Though he fought with a wide-
eyed bitter mourning rage, there were simply too many attackers for the drunk to keep at bay. The backswing of his arm caused the claw of the hammer to burry itself deep in the chest of a young Indian man with a pencil line beard. Lodged between the ribs of the man, the weapon was no longer of any use but the drunken man still tried to retrieve it. As he pushed his bare foot against the Asian man’s chest and tugged at the wooden handle, he lost his balance and fell over.

With that mistake, he was lost from sight, as the mass of murderer
s fell on him and fed on his soft, fatty meat. Their teeth tore at the still warm and fresh body of the girl he had been carrying too. Despite the gruesome and ultimately fatal wounds he suffered, the alcohol in the man’s system numbed the majority of his pain, and he managed to remain conscious long enough to see his twelve-year-old daughter reanimated.

  The
girl’s dead, vacant eyes now refocused, taking him in. She blinked away the spots of crusty blood that had dried over her pupils, and then lunged up at her despairing father, biting into the carotid artery of his neck and relishing the hot spray that drenched her. As the sudden blood loss caused the man to at last lose consciousness, his last sight was that of his innocent young girl guzzling his spilling blood. He died with an expression of utter despair and loss in his eyes.

Jenna turned away and began to sob into the hands she held pressed against her face.

“I’m going to die,” she whimpered.

Carl also turned away from the stomach turning scene of horror, pretending to comfort Jenn
a but the truth was he could no more bare to watch the mutilation than she could.

The four of them remained where they were for at least twenty minutes, while the cannibals down on the road picked over the remains of their kill
s and began to turn on each other. If they broke cover now, presented against the skyline as they were, they would surely be seen by at least one of the killers and that would be all it would take. The rickety wire mesh fence couldn’t possibly hold back the weight of those numbers for more than a few seconds. So they sat tight, forced to listen to the inhuman snarling, snapping and moaning coming from the sick and insane group.

Luckily for the four cowering survivors
, but not so much for the poor animal in question, a hungry and confused Staffordshire bullterrier unwittingly wandered out into the road in line of sight of the crowd. At the sight of this new prey, the people instantly stopped mutilating each other and sprinted off after the meagre meal. Some of those that ran on all fours managed to match the terrified dog’s pace as it fled. Watching this, Muz felt sure that the poor animal would give in to fatigue before its pursuers did.

“Let’s get out of here before they wander back this way,” he said to the others.

Getting back to their feet, they carried on along the tracks, Jenna still sniffing back mucus and tears. Muz ignored her and drove them onwards. He hadn’t considered for a second that the sickness could have spread this far without being brought under control. His fear that the police station might not be the place of safety he had been hoping grew more and more likely with each step. His eyes were trained strictly on the bend ahead in the road they were hand railing, still clinging to the hope that it would soon reveal the cordon.

“I can’t believe we didn’t do a
nything to help that guy,” Carl said.

No
one else made a comment. Nor did any of them dare to make eye contact with anyone else for a while, so deep was their guilt.

They lost sight of the road to their right, on which the police station was situated, as it arced away from the rigidly straight path of the train line they were following. As they passed by the on-slip flyover for the M1 to their left, Muz announced that they were coming up to the r
ear of the RAF museum, directly next door to the police station.