Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (23 page)

Muz had instantly recognised the man, the skin of his face for the most part being intact, despite the rest of him having been reduced to little more than a skeleton. The crazy bastards that had attacked him had clearly been very hungry indeed
, and had not been distracted from their feed until he had been stripped clean.

Hobnob
was the only name Muz knew him by, and had no idea why he was called that. He guessed that the man had been more than a little partial to tea and biscuits, but he could have been wrong.

Th
e man had been one of the IRV, level three, driving instructors here at the school, a tall, older man who had probably been approaching retirement. Though he had always been a gangly character, he had never looked as thin as he did right now. The bones of his arms and legs lolled this way and that without coordination, the last remnants of their muscle and tendons tugging at them, but he was well beyond full reanimation. With a great effort of will that showed across his face, he managed to lift a hand and delve with it into his own empty rib cage, exploring himself with child-like fascination and little concern for the pain he was in. He could not possibly harm the three men observing him from the doorway.

“Look at him,” Muz said, though he wanted to turn his own eyes away. “He looks retarded.”

Chuck nodded in agreement. “I’m guessing that none of those affected have the mental capacity to reason greater than that of a four or five year old child.”

“I’ll tell you why they can’t be zombies,” Carl said out of the blue, feeling the need to try
to rationalise the logical absurdity of the living corpse in front of him.

“What? Just look at him. He’s clearly undead,” Chuck retorted.
“And what about that smashed up woman that looked at you?”

“Zombies don’t run,” Carl murmured.

He looked troubled – badly shaken. His mind was fighting to the bitter end, refusing to buy into all this. He couldn’t accept that he was living in a world where such a catastrophe could happen. It was too much to take in.

“What?” Chuck asked, finding himself laughing.

Of all the logical arguments Carl could have come out with to deny that the people running wild in the street were zombies, all he was able to come up with was that.

“Zombies don’t run,” Carl reiterated defiantly.
“You’ve seen them; those crazy people can run. Shit, they can sprint like I’ve never seen. But zombies don’t run.”

“Clearly they fucking do. You still think this is some stupid film, don’t you?” Chuck spat, regarding Carl with an incredulous expression.

“I… I,” was all Carl could now manage to say.

“Gimme that,” Chuck said, snatching the crowbar out of the man’s hands
. “You might want to look away.”

The big black man stepped into the office and raised the bar over his head, at which point
, Carl did in fact choose to look in another direction. He was still able to hear the crunching, the wet mushing, and Chuck’s laboured grunts though.

When he had finished doing what he felt he needed to do, Chuck returned from the room and thrust the crowbar back at Carl.

“His suffering’s over,” was all he said.

Though he tried his hardest not to, Carl found himself compelled to steel a glance into the office. Little now remained of the driving instructor’s head, lumps of broken jaw and skull hanging from ripped flesh. Chuck had managed to hook the brain with the bar and tug it free of its housing in the cranial bowl. Carl saw the grey organ splattered across the floor, having been stamped on by Chuck’s boot. And yet
, despite this brutal mutilation, the man’s tongue, lolling forth from the open neck wound, flicked this way and that, lapping hungrily at his own blood clots.

Suddenly dizzy and feeling that he might faint, Carl tu
rned away and looked with horror at the bloodied end of the crowbar. Holding the iron bar at arm’s length, he hurried over to the sinks in one corner of the garage where all of the car cleaning equipment was kept.

“Keep your wits about you,” Muz called after him.

“Look what I found,” Chuck said to Muz, with a huge beaming smile.

Muz looked down at one of the man’s enormous hands to see a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.

“They were on the desk,” Chuck said, pulling out one of the fags, putting it in his mouth, and sparking it up.

Muz couldn’t believe the man. He had just beat
en someone to death with an iron bar and was behaving as though nothing had happened. He shook his head when Chuck offered him the packet.

“Are you sure that’s safe?” Muz said. “Those things could kill you.”

“Don’t start,” Chuck replied, as he sighed heavily with pleasure, exhaling the first long drag of smoke. “I know exactly what they’re doing to me.”

“No, I mean we don’t
know how all this is spreading,” the copper explained. “They could be infected.”

“I’m willing to take the risk,” Chuck coughed. After all he had been
through, he needed to take a little pleasure from something. “So, no cars. I guess we’re running to the tube station then.”

“Not necessarily,” Muz replied, nodding over at Jumbo One.

Chuck followed his line of sight and laughed. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

Having found the keys for the JCB hanging in the wall cabinet in the office, Muz jumped into the digger’s cab and turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared into life
, then settled down to chug more sedately. The noise of this beast of a machine might well attract zombies, or whatever the hell they were, but its huge shovel would be great for fending off any attackers.

“Climb on,” Muz called down to Carl and Chuck over the rumbling motor.

He would be safe enough with the cab door closed but there was no space whatsoever to fit a second person in with him. The other two men would have to hang from the outside, but it still gave them an advantage over simply walking. Standing on the engine housing at the rear and clinging to the exterior of the cab would keep them about five feet above ground level, creating at least an element of distance and a height advantage over any assailants.

“You on?” Muz shouted, as the others climbed aboard.

“Go for it,” Chuck told him.

Muz scanned the array of levers
, buttons, and pedals in front of him, and selecting what appeared to be the gear lever, pushed it out of neutral. Contrary to the desired effect, the whole vehicle jolted as the digger arm suddenly raised up off the ground.

“Try again,” Carl called sarcastically into the cab.

Reassessing the unfamiliar controls, Muz tried another stick and this time, as he raised the clutch, the machine lurched forward.

“Bingo,” Carl shouted.

Muz drove them out of the garage and back through the school grounds the way they had come, while Chuck and Carl clinging to the cab tried not to choke on the hot carbon monoxide spewing from the end of the exhaust on the rear of the roof. They passed by the locked gate they had climbed over to get into the site and took a left through a car park to another gate. This second gate was an exit only, fully automated ‘airlock’ type system. As the heavy digger rolled over the pressure censor hidden under the tarmac, the first of the barriers opened, allowing Muz to drive into the caged area the twin gates formed.

“Looks like our friends are back,” Chuck announced, seeing that while they sat there, waiting for the gat
e behind them to close, the mutilated teenage girl and two men were staggering, crawling, and dragging themselves over from the Micra to the source of the engine sound.

Once
the first gate had clanged closed to their rear, all three men stared in fixed anticipation at the second gate immediately to their front, and the three animated cadavers beyond.

“As soon as that opens, you floor it,” Chuck bellowed, banging on the little Perspex window at Muz.
“Mow them down if you have to.”

Muz did not respond, an expression of troubled indecision written on his face
, as he gripped the steering wheel unnecessarily tight.

“They’re already dead,” Chuck insisted.

Though in reality it could not have been more than a handful of seconds, it seemed like an age before the second barrier began to move aside. As it finally did so, Muz pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor, roaring the engine loudly and causing more noxious fumes to plume from the overhead exhaust. The moment he had enough room to squeeze through, he lifted the clutch and the mechanical monster leapt into the road like an enraged bull from its pen.

The afflicted trio, disturbing to look at, were in the road directly in the way of the vehicle. Muz sounded the loud deep note of the horn but didn’t ease off the throttle in the slightest. The man with the skinned head stepped out of the way of the JCB’s relentless path just in time
, but the other two were not so lucky.

Baring down on the man on all fours and the half girl, Muz looked into their eyes and took some strange solace from their obvious murderous intent. The enormous wheels of the digger drove straight over them, crushing and crunching their bones and bursting the man’s chest and abdomen like a water balloon. Muz didn’t
even feel the slightest impact.

Having
sidestepped the vehicle, skull-head now ran at it in a side-on attack, in an effort to get at the living bags of meat hanging from its exterior. With a perfectly timed swing, Carl connected one end of the crowbar with the side of the man’s head, dislodging the tooth from its crack and ripping free the sole remaining section of skin. With the extent of his bravery depleted, Carl then scuttled up to sit on the roof of the cab as far from the road below as possible, and tried to shake free the man’s ear that was stuck in the fork at the end of the crowbar.

Despite the skull-cracking blow, the mad man remained standing. Chuck saw that his head was now decidedly concave
d, shards of splintered cranium plunging deep into the visible brain tissue. Skull-head’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he looked incapable of any further attack.

Chuck wasn’t taking any chances however. Holding firmly onto one of the several metal
handgrips on the JCB’s exterior, he leaned out from where he stood on the wheel arch and delivered a hefty size twelve boot hard to the man’s already ruined face. The angle of the powerful blow spun his head so fast that it broke his neck, and he dropped to the ground with all the grace of a sack of faeces.

The digger chugged forwards onto the roundabout, leaving the three twitching bodies and sticky crimson
tread marks in its wake. It smashed into and easily shoved aside the Micra that had been blocking the entrance to Colindale Avenue.

Shards of brilliant daylight cut through pockets in the otherwise densely pack
ed grey cloud cover. It seemed that the day was reluctantly brightening a little as it went on, Carl mused. He was trying to focus on anything but the horrific events of the past two days, while absently trying to shake free the ear lobe that still remained wedged in the prong at the end of his crowbar. The day still wasn’t growing any warmer though.

“It’s a pity this thing doesn’t have
flashing blue lights,” he called down to Chuck.

“Why?” the large African man
asked.

“Well, it would look cool, that’s all.”

“Cool?” Chuck echoed, looking at Carl intently, trying to determine his state mind.

Feeling uncomfortable under
the scrutiny, Carl looked away, concentrating on the road ahead. It was an even shorter drive than he had been expecting, lasting a little less than a couple of minutes. Nonetheless, he was extremely glad of the protection their ride afforded them. They came across several more stray victims of the epidemic in the short distance to the tube station, and though they were all in a semi-consumed state, broken and suffering blood loss, he would not have relished facing them on foot.

Muz steered the JCB in a winding manner down the street, avoiding abandoned cars and turning the digger’s huge toothed shovel on anyone who came too close.
Mentally shattered, the people they came across appeared to have no concern whatsoever for their own well-being, and they made no attempt to get out of the way of the weighty weapon, despite Muz’s incessant pressing of the bull horn.

The shovel’s cutting edge smashed into their faces, lifted them off their feet and dropped them in their tracks. One unfortunate man’s head
became stuck between two of the metal teeth and he was dragged along by the neck, as his feet trailing beneath him were chewed at by the advance of the two front wheels. His face was a picture of utter agony. Chuck dared precariously to clamber down the digger arm and repeatedly stomp on the man’s forehead, until he was dislodged and fell under the wheels with a horrible crunch, and a last scream of pain.

Having almost reached the tube station now, they chugged over the bridge above the train line. Carl, from his vantage position, was able to look over the wall at the side of the road and down at the tracks below. The rigid
route of the metal rails was beeline, heading straight for those now obscured far off towers.