Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (27 page)

With the two people so threateningly close though
, another of his instincts, self-preservation, kicked in. His muscles tensed and he bared his teeth, readying himself to leap forth and attack, but just at that moment, the pair moved on and left him be.

“It’s clear downstairs,” Muz announced on returning to the floor above.

“Great,” Carl said with obvious relief, slumping onto one of the benches and again nursing his injured hand.

He was losing mobility in the offended finger as
it swelled to a comical size. In an effort to both comfort and distract himself from the pain, with his good hand, he reached into the elasticated beltline of his jogging bottoms and produced a wad of lottery scratch cards that had been pressed against his stomach. Using his thumbnail, he began to scratch off the little grey panels.

“Where did you get all those from?” Muz asked him.

“The shop in Colindale tube station,” Carl replied. He didn’t care anymore that Muz was a copper. The world was too messed up for a little thing like shoplifting to be of any concern.

“You do realise that’s theft, don’t you?” Muz challenged him.

“Yeah and? You’re about to go out and do the same, officer,” Carl bit back.

“Yes, for things we need, not frigging lottery tickets.” Despite his anger at Carl’s blatant disregard for the law, Muz let the matter go.

“You know the lottery’s just a voluntary tax?” Chuck asked, seizing the opportunity to have a dig.

“Not if you don’t pay for the tickets,” Carl responded with a smug smirk.

“Nobody ever really wins the lottery anyway,” Chuck continued. “Not the big money. It’s all a con.”

“What are you talking about? People win it every week,” Carl said.

“Exactly,” Chuck said. “How many winners must there have been by now since it all began? And yet, do you actually know someone who has won it? Do you even know anyone who knows someone who won it? No, because it’s all staged.”

Carl laughed and shook his head, returning his attention to the tickets
in his hands. While the man was distracted, Muz reached down and took the crowbar from the bench beside him. Carl looked up with the hurt eyes of a child who had his favourite toy taken from him.

“What? I’m not going out there with just my crappy ASP when I could have this instead,” Muz told him.

Carl didn’t respond, but his lower lip protruded out, as he continued fruitlessly to scratch away at the pieces of card.

“Here,” Muz then said to Chuck, thrusting a heavy candlestick into his hands. “This should be effective if needs be, and it will save you having to use those precious bullets of yours.”

Chuck took the length of heavy metal and stared defiantly back at Muz.

“Right, we’re off,” Muz then said, walking over to the main external door and unbarring it. “Lock this as soon as we’re gone
, but I want one of you stood right next to the door until we get back. As soon as you hear us knock, let us in.”

“Don’t leave us hanging,” Chuck added.

“Okay,” Amy replied. Her nod and fixed eye contact told the men they could trust her.

The strange looking pair, the white police officer and the black man in custody clothing, stepped outside
, and as one, scowled against the drizzle that immediately dampened their faces and their moods further. The front of the church, with a Greek pillar either side of the huge wooden door, a flight of stone steps leading down to the ground and the neatly trimmed lines of privet boarding the gardens, certainly commanded more respect as a place of worship than the inconspicuous rear of the premises had.

Muz looked over to their left in the direction they needed to head for the shops. The view of the high street was obscured by a hump in the road, as it rose to pass over the train line below. To the extent that he could see, the road was the usual scene of abandoned cars and prostrate corpses, and he began to have second thoughts about what they were about to do. Given that
Chuck only had his own interests at heart, as he had proven, Muz was not exactly enthralled about relying on him alone to back him up should things go wrong.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Chuck asked with a laugh, on seeing the nervous expression on the copper’s face.

“Yes. Yes, I am bloody scared. And if you’re not, you’re an idiot,” Muz spat back.

Chuck laughed again
, but as he scanned over to his right, the sound was cut suddenly short in his throat.

“Look,” he said, elbowing Muz in the ribs.

“Ow. What?”

Looking over at where Chuck was pointing, Muz saw
that in the centre of the crossroads, surrounded by crashed cars, there was a single person. The man was simply standing there, motionless, staring back at them. His arms hung limply from his slumped shoulders and his mouth was slightly agape. The gentle rain had drenched both his hair and his clothes, but he appeared unmoved by the sodden cold, for his body temperature was almost the same as that of the chilly air, his heart dormant in his chest.

“Do you think he’s got the madness?” Muz asked, not taking his eyes from the man in the road.

“Dunno,” Chuck replied in an equally hushed tone. “He doesn’t look injured like all the others… but look at his eyes and his skin.”

Despite the man not tak
ing a step towards them, his eyes were locked on Muz and Chuck with a blatant expression of murderous intent. His skin, though he was clearly of Indian heritage, was a bloodless pale grey.

“Well, he’s not in our way. We need to go left,” Muz said. “So let’s leave him be.”

“No,” Chuck replied. “What if, on the way back, we need to get into the church fast and he’s blocking our way?”

It was a fair point, Muz conceded
, and holding the crowbar up to his shoulder, his heart beginning to race wildly, he trod down the stone steps and into the road towards the man.

Watching Muz’s advance with Chuck close in tow, Raj still just stood there.
Though he gave off the outward appearance of apathy, inside he was struggling with the burning desire not to attack the men. It was the same inner turmoil he had been fighting the whole time he had been following them along the tube line.

Losing his nerve, Muz stopped in his tracks about ten feet from where Raj stood. They stared at each other in the rain, rage in Raj’s eyes, confusion growing in Muz’s.

“Do it,” Chuck urged over Muz’s shoulder, causing him to jump.

“Hang on,” Muz said, angry at the sudden shock. “Can you understand me?” he asked the man in front of him. “Are you okay?”

“Just do it,” Chuck demanded. “He looks dead to me.”

With a sudden rush of mental clarity that lifted Raj from the fog of his broken thoughts, he looked at the iron bar Muz was brandishing and recognised it for what it was – a weapon.
As the image of Kate’s pleading face flashed before his eyes, Raj stepped towards Muz, dropped to his knees on the wet tarmac and bowed his head.

Muz lifted the bar higher, so as to bring it down on the man’s head with greater force
, but instead, just held it aloft. Despite the number of people he had killed over the last couple of days, he couldn’t bring himself to murder this man who appeared to be no threat to them.

Having not felt the life-ending blow, Raj looked up at Muz.
For the moment, the fury in the Indian man’s eyes was gone and all that remained, was a dejected sadness.

“Go on then,” Chuck said, frustrated now.

“I can’t,” Muz choked out. “He’s not like the others.”

“You sure about that? Look at the blood around his mouth and down his shirt. He’s a killer.”

“He’s not trying to kill us now though… and I swear there’s still a spark of intelligence in the way he’s looking at me.”

“He looks like he couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow to me,” Chuck replied.
“Stand back. I’ll do it.”

As Chuck tried to move around Muz, the copper put a hand on the big man’s chest.

“Let’s just leave him,” Muz said.

Chuck continued to push him out of the way.

“If you kill him, I’ll see you in the dock for murder when all this is over,” Muz now told him firmly. The words came from his mouth in a calm matter-of-fact manner, but they carried a weight Chuck didn’t like.

The bigger man
strode off towards the shops, leaving Muz to stare down at the man kneeling in the water coursing down the road before him. Unable to take Raj’s imploring stare any longer, he too turned and walked after Chuck.

Raj went limp and collapsed into the gutter at the side of the road. Hearing the resulting splash, Muz looked back over his shoulder. Was the afflicted Indian man actually crying
? He couldn’t be. It had to be the accumulated water droplets of the thin rain trickling down his face.

Muz and Chuck crested the brow of the road
and were thus afforded a view of the rest of Watling Avenue. It was a shitty looking street at the best of times, one that Muz had always habitually avoided driving down, due to it instantly ruining his mood. A haven for robbers, shoplifters, and junkie scumbags, the road was lined with competing convenience stores and fast food shops, which Muz wouldn’t buy food from even if he were half starved. Most of the storefronts had their metal shutters rolled down, shutters which were emblazoned with spray-painted gang tags and random obscenities.

Surprisingly, there were no massing
hordes to be seen. The length of the road before the two men appeared empty of any other people, other than skeletal cadavres. Those afflicted who may have been hanging around here had apparently moved off elsewhere in search of prey.

“Aren’t you curious why that man behaved
so differently from all the rest towards us?” Muz asked Chuck.

“Couldn’t care less, just so long as he leaves me alone,” Chuck replied, as he weaved his way among the abandoned vehicles.

They reached a dip in the road, a trough in the lay of the land before it rose once more to meet the A5 at the road’s end. Here they found a general store, which had been broken into. The lock holding the shutter in place had been somehow wrenched off and the metal slats pushed back up into the overhead roller. The glass of the shop’s door had then been shattered in order to gain entry.

With a last scan of the deserted street, the men clambered through the broken door into the relative darkness within. As they had expected, the place had been ransacked, the contents of many of the shelves flung onto the floor.
Despite the store having been looted though, there was still plenty of stock left still to be thieved. Chuck saw that hanging from hooks high on the wall above the counter, there was a selection of cheap sports bags and rucksacks. Shoving aside the little racks of chewing gum, he clambered onto the wooden counter top. Reaching up, he then grabbed two of the rucksacks, throwing one down to Muz.

“Fill it with whatever you think might come in handy,” Chuck said. “But don’t take all day about it.”

Placing the crowbar down against a wall, Muz worked his way along the narrow aisles between the tightly arranged shelves and fridges, filling the bag with mainly bottles of water and various items of food. Chuck did the same, hurriedly looking for items of worth, with the occasional look back at the front door.

“Okay, I’m done,” Chuck said, to Muz’s surprise, as his own bag was as yet only half full.

“Hang on, give me a minute,” Muz replied, feeling flustered at having to decide so rapidly as to what to take and what to discard.

“Hurry up,” Chuck told him. “I’m going to wait by the door and keep an eye on the street.”

Chuck stepped outside, leaving Muz to work his way towards the rear of the store. Just then, Muz heard a noise. It was the faintest of sounds, so quiet that he couldn’t even begin to guess what it had been, but he had definitely heard something and it had come from the back room.

The copper
froze, not even breathing, staring at the nearby door that stood ajar. Just beyond, a strip light flickered defectively, providing only intermittent glimpses of the storage room. Straining his eyes, Muz tried to make sense of the images that the flashes of light teasingly illuminated.

“Shit, we’ve got movement out here,” he heard Chuck whisper back into the building as loud as he dared.

Still, Muz couldn’t bring himself to move and he continued to listen as intently as he could for any further tell-tale sounds. It was then that his eyes at last made some sense of the strobing picture of the back room. Amid the stacked boxes and crates there stood the motionless silhouette of what was indisputably the head and shoulders of a man.

“Get out here now. We’ve got to go,” Chuck now growled from outside.

Muz could tell from the man’s tone of voice that things were not good out on the street, and they needed to get back to the church, but still, he couldn’t bring himself to move, fearful that even the slightest flinch from him would bring that ominous figure in the adjacent room running out to attack him. Indecision gripped him. He had to do something and do it fast.

It was a menacing snarl emanating for the shadowed figure that finally jolted him into motion.
Though he wanted to bolt for the front door of the shop, contrary to this instinct, he instead ran for the door to the backroom. As he had expected, his movement caused the figure under the flickering bulb to spring into something resembling life. The other man crashed through the crates and had almost reached the door when Muz grabbed the handle and pulled it shut with a slam. A split second later, the flimsy chipboard panels of the door bounced in the frame with the weight of heavy man ramming them. Muz stepped back and watched the door handle. Just as he had prayed, though the door continued to rattle precariously in its frame, the handle didn’t move. The deranged man on the other side simply no longer had the intellect to use the lever to open the door.