Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (25 page)

The station m
anager, still slumped at his side, growling and reaching up with clawing hands, distracted him from those he was trailing. Already Raj’s relentless hunger was raging anew. Completely ignoring the crippled man, he squatted and took hold of the bare bones of an arm belonging to the butchered skeleton of a woman. With several hard tugs, he tore the limb free at the elbow and stood with the badly mauled hand hanging limp from the radius and ulna he was holding. Smashing the two bare bones of the forearm against the wall, he broke them in half and sucked greedily on the exposed succulent marrow within.

He saw his quarry disappear from sight around the gentle westward arc of the tracks. Dropping the bones, he went after them. As he loped along, an image of his
partner, Kate’s screaming face leapt from his shattered memories to the forefront of his mind. He shook his head wildly and growled, attempting to block out the picture of her suffering.

“Oh no,” Amy said in despair, patting her pockets repeatedly. “My phone must have fallen out in the crash. I should go back.”

“Leave it,” Muz said over his shoulder.

The woman paused, looking yearningly back along the bending track. She
knew the man was right though. It was dangerous back there, and retracing her steps just to get her mobile would be a stupid idea. Sulkily, she plodded off after the others.

“So, what do you know
about all this?” Carl asked the little woman.

Both Muz and Chuck, who were a few feet ahead, turned their heads in interest of the woman’s answer.
On this side of the tracks, there stood a tall wire mesh fence between them and some newly built flats. On the other side, there was a wall that was no less than twenty feet high. The two men therefore allowed themselves the small luxury of dropping their guards a moment to regard the woman.

“Not a lot,” was the young woman’s disappointing reply.

“Have you any ideas at all what might have caused all this?” Carl pressed her.

“No.”

“Nothing?” Carl pushed further, sounding more than a little desperate.

Amy made eye contact with him now. All she wanted was to be left alone to walk along in silence
, but she could see this man was just as traumatised by all this as she was, though he was trying his best to conceal it. He needed some kind of logical answer to cling to, so that he could at least begin to understand what was happening and not just think the world had gone completely insane for no reason.

“I guess it might be due to some sort of viral epidemic,” was all she could offer him. “But I really have no idea.”

“Tell us what you do know,” Muz said. “Any information you have might prove useful.”

“Okay,” Amy conceded grudgingly. “My colleague and I were called out to a twelve
-year-old boy suffering bite wounds. He’d been savagely bitten by his older brother. Reading the details of the call while we were en route, we assumed that we were going to the result of a simple sibling fight and the injury would be minor.

“
We were wrong. The boy had deep bloody bite marks all the way up his right arm and shoulder, where his brother, in a frenzied attack, had been apparently trying to work his way up to the neck before the parents had managed to intervene. They had been forced to drag the older boy off and lock him in a bedroom. I could hear him, banging away at the door and walls, as I was treating the boy’s injuries. I kept hoping the police would turn up soon.

“The younger brother wasn’t in too bad a state, quite a bit of blood loss
, but nothing to be concerned about. My colleague and I stopped the bleeding and dressed his wounds. It was then that I noticed that his breathing was becoming slow and shallow, as was his heart rate. His temperature was dropping too. I put it down to loss of blood and shock. I wasn’t too worried at first, thinking I would be able to counteract it, but his vitals continued to drop. He was deteriorating rapidly, and nothing I did made any difference.”

Amy paused a second, her brow furrowing with the difficulty of reliving the events. She didn’t want to continue but the eyes of her audience, intently focussed on her, compelled her to finish her story.

“After about fifteen minutes, he went into full cardiac arrest. We tried to use the defib’ on him, but it told me that there was no electrical activity in the heart whatsoever.

“I thought he was dead. The police
, who had finally arrived, told us to back away and not touch the boy anymore, as his body was now a crime scene. At that point, the parents went mental. The mother clawed at one officer’s face, while the father tried to fight his way past the other to get to the boy. It was heart breaking.

“Even though other emergency calls were coming over the radio quicker than I’
ve ever known, we were told we had to remain at the scene to give statements to the police.”

The young paramedic’s eyes were completely defocused now, as she was completely submerged in her own story. Her face took on a picture of utter confusion and she shook her head, as though trying to deny what had happened next.

“After about ten minutes though, the boy came round. He was alive. The police looked at me as… as though I didn’t know how to do my job.

“That’s when it went really crazy. There must have been something wrong with the heart rate monitor, because the boy was still showing a flat line. So… I was che
cking the machine, when the boy just suddenly jumped to his feet and attacked an officer and… and…”

The three men looked around at each other with ominous expressions.

“He… he...,” Amy stammered, beginning to lose control of her emotions.

“It’s okay,” Chuck told her. “We get the idea.”

Amy fell thankfully silent, her head dropping so as to hide the tears welling in her eyes.

“See. Zombies,” Chuck concluded, turning to his front again to scan around him with renewed caution.

“What?” Amy said, looking up at the black man, startled by the obscene word. “Zombies? That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, it’s currently a topic of debate,” Muz told her dryly.

“How else do you explain that child dying, then coming back to life and attacking a police officer?” Chuck asked the woman, not bothering to look back at her again and not caring for an answer.

“He wasn’t… I don’t
…,” Amy stuttered again.

All those hours she had hidden in the crashed ambulance, she had wondered what it was that could have caused all these people to behave in such an inhuman manner
, but not once had the notion of zombies entered her mind. Now, forced to contemplate the possible absurdity, her brain seemed to be incapable of coherent lines of thought, leaving her struggling to speak. “Zombies don’t… can’t exist.”

“Who says?” Chuck said, continuing to press her buttons.

Muz wished the man would just let the matter drop. Couldn’t he see the effect he was having on the poor woman? She was already a quivering mess, without him winding her up.

“Medical science says,”
Amy fought back, anger growing within her in response to this man’s stupidity. “When you’re dead, you’re dead. Your heart doesn’t beat and without that, the blood can’t pump around the body. Without the blood carrying oxygen to fuel the muscles, you simply can’t move. It can’t happen.”

“That’s a very valid argument. I suggest you back up there and put it to all those wandering corpses,” Chuck said with a smirk. “Maybe they’ll realise the error of their ways and drop motionless to the ground
, like any self-respecting cadaver should.”

“Look, I don’t care what they are,” Muz cut it finally, seeing a tear trickle down Amy’s cheek. “All I know is
that we need to stay clear of them if we want to stay alive. So let’s stop wasting time and energy chatting and push on.”

As they walked along in the gravel, staying well clear of the tracks, the high wall to their right came to an end and was replaced by a metal fence, through which
, could be seen people’s gardens. To their left, the new-build blocks were succeeded by a stretching area of allotments. For quite some time, they didn’t see a single person on either side, alive, dead, or anywhere in-between.

It was only when they crossed over a small bridge that traversed a footpath and the allotments were left behind, giving way to Montrose Playing Fields, that they at last saw another survivor. In those fields, beyond the wire fence and down the embankment, they saw a slim, young-looking man following the path that led under the bridge. He was clearly nervous
, his head whipping from side to side as he trotted along, trying to cross the open expanse as quickly as possible without tiring himself out.

As he drew nearer, Muz was able to make out the black epaulettes on his shoulders against the white of his shirt
, and the pouches hanging from the belt he wore. He was a police officer.

Just then
, the officer stopped in his tracks and stared, terrified towards to trees off to his left. Watching him, the eyes of Muz and the others were drawn to follow his line of sight. Emerging from those trees, they saw what had startled him.

A short
, shirtless, obese man came running into view, his huge stomach rippling with every bounding step. Despite his stumpy stature and the several stones of blubber coating his body, the speed at which he was sprinting towards the lone police officer was formidable. As he too drew nearer, his raging scream could be heard, growing in volume.

The officer looked panicked now and broke into a sprint himself, still heading for the bridge. As he did so, he saw Muz and the others on the tracks above, presented against the near horizon.

“Come on, mate,” Muz called out, realising his colleague had spotted him.

Responding to the call, the desperately sprinting copper changed course slightly, making his way to the embankment and the group.

“Oh shit,” Muz gasped.

“What’s wrong?” Carl asked, unable to take his eyes from the officer’s plight.

“I know him,” Muz told him. Now that he was able to see the young man’s face, and that all too distinctive contrived bedhead hairstyle, he recognised him as one of the new lads on his team. “O’Connell, over here. Come on!”

Muz knew that Mark O’Connell was one of the few police officers who made the effort to keep himself in shape
, and was a decent runner. Despite this however, and despite the fact that the fat man chasing him was easily five stone heavier, and his lack of height meant he was almost having to take two steps to the officer’s one, Mark was losing ground. O’Connell looked extremely fatigued, panting and struggling with exertion. His gait was weary and he began to slow, despite knowing that his life was on the line. How long had he been outrunning these madmen?

The fat man cared nothing for the pain of his joints suffering under his bounding weight,
or for the burning of his muscles or his lungs. They failed to distract him in the slightest from his goal, drowned out as they were by the agony of the decay his body was undergoing on a cellular level, a rotting that only fresh meat could counteract. What remained of his consciousness was focused on one thing alone, the sprinting bag of meat and blood in front of him.

O’Connell made it to the bottom of the embankment and dared to glance over his shoulder, to see the stubby
wobbling man bearing down on him. That sight was more than enough incentive to cause him to throw himself through the thorn bushes at the edge of the field. The branches sliced at his exposed forearms and face, but he didn’t even notice, as he flung himself up the hill with all the energy he had left in him.

“Turkish, thank fuck,” Mark panted gratefully on recognising Muz. “Help me.”

“Climb over,” Muz frantically urged him.

Grabbing at the holes in the wire mesh that stood between him and safety, Mark pulled himself up, his legs flailing beneath him uselessly.
Simultaneously, Muz was climbing the other side of the fence in an effort to mount it and pull his colleague up and over. The fence buckled and swayed under their combined weight.

Hearing the obese man’s crazed snarls as he raced tirelessly up the embankment, Mark panicked even more and lost his grip.

Carl pressed himself against the fence and tried to feed his hands through the holes, in an attempt to hold the police officer’s toes and give him something to grip with his feet. As the copper’s booted feet scrabbled at the fence, they hit Carl’s fingers. Hearing a snap and feeling a sudden sharp pain, Carl instinctively retracted his hands.

Muz lost his balance on top of the fence as it swayed left and right. He almost fell over onto the field side
, but then overcorrected and slammed down hard into the stone chips by the train tracks.

Had he not given into panic, Mark might have managed the climb in time. As it was however, he lost a handhold again and slipped down the fence
, just as the obese man with cold dead eyes fell upon him. The flabby folds of the attacker’s pallid body writhed as he began furiously to feed. Lumps of raw yellow-white fat protruded from various mouth-sized holes torn into his bloated body from where he had been someone else’s victim.

The group stood inches from the
ensuing massacre, impotent as the young police officer tried in vain to defend himself from the brutal merciless attack being inflicted upon him. He screamed and swore, his fists pummelling hard and fast into the fat man’s face. The half-naked insane man didn’t care in the slightest about the cartilage of his nose snapping, or his incisors being hammered out of his jaw at their roots. He continued to bite down with what teeth he had left and tear lumps of lean muscle from Mark’s body.