Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (34 page)

The herd, having been attacked by infected humans and thus become crazed themselves, in desperate need of meat, had broken free of their fields to the north of the Stonegrove, just the other side of the A41. They had since been wandering the streets of Edgware. Moving as a hunting pack and being bigger, stronger and faster than humans, even the infected people they had come across had stood no chance against them. They had devoured almo
st everyone they had found, infected and uninfected alike.

One of the beasts was carrying the struggling cadaver of an unfortunate victim in its mouth, tossing its head this way and that to prevent its sisters from stealing the prize. The man struggled wildly, clawing and biting feverishly at the heifer’s face
, but he could not escape, the cow’s teeth having sunk deep into his shoulder, burying into the joint between the bones of his humorous and clavicle.

The hooves of the starving beasts clattered loudly directly by Carl’s head, as he lay under the car and he found himself praying for the abominations to pass him by. Suddenly, one of
the foul Friesians let out an almighty deep-throated bellow and slammed into the car, causing it to rock violently inches above Carl’s face. Though he thought they had found him and he was about to pay the ultimate price for all the steaks he had eaten in his life, no second bellow came. The cow had simply been responding to her ear being bitten off by one of her sister’s.

Carl dared to unscrew his eyes and could now see, directly beside the car, the hugely bulging belly of one of the carnivorous cud-chewers. Pressing out against the skin from within
one of the animal’s massively swollen stomachs, he saw the unmistakable shape of a human face contorted in a scream.

Digby began to whine with nervous agitation. Amy frantically rubbed at his chest and put a hand over his muzzle, silently mouthing at him to be quiet.

The two cows either side of the one carrying the man seized their opportunity then, and simultaneously tried to rip him free of her bite. The cow with the thrashing afflicted man in her teeth bellowed with rage and rose up onto her hind legs briefly, kicking at the others. A fight then ensued, as more and more of the cows tried to snatch the dangling man for themselves. His arms and legs were all bitten into and he was tugged mercilessly this way and that. With the horrible sound of ripping flesh that cut over even the din of his screaming, he was torn apart.

The man’s upper torso, head and one arm still attached, slapped onto the tarmac of the road, forgotten momentarily, as the demented beasts fought over the other pieces of his body.

Desperately needing to know what was going on, Muz dared to steel a glance around the hedge again. It was at exactly the wrong moment. What remained of the half-eaten man saw him before he ducked back into cover.

Though there was virtually nothing left of him, the man’s overruling concern was still his terrible hunger. He hissed and began to drag himself as best he could with his one arm across the road to where Muz was hiding.

“Oh shit,” Muz whispered, having snatched yet another look around the hedge. “There’s half of a man coming this way. He’s going to draw those cows over to us.”

“Are you fucking stupid?” Chuck snarled back in the loudest whisper he dared. “Stop fucking looking.”

The remains of the man continued laboriously to drag himself towards the hedge line, oblivious to the crunching sounds of the bones of his own limbs being eaten around him. Then he saw, under the car he passed by, Carl’s terrified wide-eyed face staring out at him. He growled fiercely and coughed up a lump of clotted blood, then reached under the car to grab at Carl.

Trying his hardest not to whimper too loudly, Carl kicked back defiantly at the graspi
ng arm. He flicked his legs too and fro, praying that grasping hand wouldn’t take hold of him, but it was too much to hope for. The half-dead man’s vice-like grip locked onto the bottom of one leg of Carl’s jogging bottoms and he dragged himself forward under the car.

Just as Carl was thinking he couldn’t hold in his scream any longer, a huge slobbering muzzle appeared in the gap between the car and the road and bit into the other man’s head. The cranium cracked under the force, causing the afflicted male’s eyes to bulge. He screamed, losing his grip on Carl’s leg, and was dragged away. As the remains of the man were lifted up out of Cal’s line of sight, he heard him still wailing in pain for a moment, before the sound was cut off with the snapping of bone.

With the meal now fully consumed, the cows ceased their fighting among one another and, after what seemed like forever, the terrible herd headed off down the road in the direction the group had come. The repugnant stink of their rotting hides trailed behind them.

With the threat gone, ever so cautiously, the group re-emerged from their hiding places.

“Is okay?” Tom asked, peering out from under the bin lid.

  “Yes, mate,” Muz responded and helped the man out.

Carl slid from his cover under the car and began to dust down his cheap police custody clothes, looking with a sense of trepidation in the direction the cows had gone.

As he was doing so, a tiny ball of fluff no bigger than a cocktail sausage, having been disturbed by the humans, came running out from the nearby hedge. Amy screamed as it darted past her. She instinctively tried to stamp on it and Digby made an effort to bite it. It was far too fast
for either of them however and Digby instead butted the paving slab beneath him with the end of his muzzle. Everyone now joined in the dance, trying to stomp the life out of the lightning fast miniscule creature but it evaded them all, dodging this way and that between their steps.

With a high pitched squeak, it launched itself at Carl and ran up the leg of his jogging bottoms. The man couldn’t have been more grateful that
the hems were elasticated and the little monster therefore remained on the outside. Halfway up his thigh, it stopped and began to chew its way through the cloth in effort to get at his skin beneath.

Carl began to hop around frantically
on one leg while shaking the other wildly.

“Get it off. Get it off,” he begged.

“Stand still then,” Chuck told him and then kicked him square in the balls.

Carl dropped to the floor like a sack of spuds, clutching his groin and groaning.

“Sorry but I did say stand still,” Chuck said and kicked him again.

This time he hit him hard in the thigh, causing Carl to cry out in pain again
, but it had the desired effect. He crushed the furry ball with the tread of his heavy boots and it dropped to the ground. While Carl continued to writhe around beside it, the others gathered around to examine little lump. Squashed as it was, it no longer posed any threat.

“Is still alive,” Tom said, seeing it twitch, and stamped on it again.

Now it was little more than a mess of guts, yet still, its tiny broken limbs continued to thrash.

“What the hell is it?” Carl wheezed.

“I think it was a vole,” Muz replied.

“A zombie vole,” Chuck added, full of seriousness.

“A what?” Carl asked, making a show of struggling to get to his feet.

“Like a mouse but even smaller,” Muz explained.

“I was almost bitten and infected by a mouse? That would have been a shit way to go,” Carl grumbled.

“Ha! You funny man,” Tom said cheerfully. He tried to slap Carl hard on the back but he saw it coming and despite still limping, leapt out of the way.

The epidemic had spread rapidly through the human population, the inherent survival instincts of man having been dramatically dulled by living in a world without the fear of attack from predators. It had spread just as fast through the domesticated animals, horses, cows, dogs, whose own survival instincts had been weaned out of them by thousands of years of husbandry, creating creatures more and more cowed and placid in nature.

The wild animals inhabiting this urban landscape, having learned to live alongside man while barely being seen, had initially fared better, so much more adept were they at hiding from and evading danger. But the madness was now even beginning to spread among their hidden populations, as that tiny rodent had proven.

Muz led the group first down Oakleigh Gardens then turned onto Kings Drive, weaving through the neighbourhood, heading for the tallest of the nearby blocks.

It was as they trotted along this road that they saw easily the saddest victim of the epidemic so far.
The cows not having found him and torn him apart yet had to be down to nothing but luck. Bad luck. At least being eaten by the herd would have put an end to his obvious suffering.

The white man in his mid-thirties, as best could be judged given his state, came staggering out of the open doorway of one of the
houses directly in front of the group. He was no threat to the band of survivors. He had no eyes in his sockets with which to see them. His nose had been bitten off, the remaining cavity blocked with clotted and scabbed blood, so he could not track them by their body odour either. The muscles of both his arms had been eaten completely away, causing them to flap utterly useless at his side. Even if he had been somehow able to catch them, he would still have posed no threat, as his lower jaw has been completely torn away, leaving his tongue to loll and lick at his neck. The only sense at all he had to go on vainly to track his prey, was his hearing. His head flicked this way and that, as he responded to every little sound the group made as they passed him by.

“Now that’s how zombies should move,” Carl stated, remarking on his slow clumsy staggering.

“Is no one going to put him out of his misery?” Amy asked, her eyes brimming with sorrow for the man’s plight.

“I can’t be bothered,” Chuck reluctantly responded, as he was the one she was looking directly at. “Those cow’s will find
him soon enough.”

Muz and Carl chose to ignore her, while Tom seemed oblivious to the conversation, scanning intently ahead of them.

“You didn’t seem to have had a problem killing these people so far?” Amy pressed the fat man.

“Yeah
, well, believe it or not, I’ve had my fill of killing for one day,” Chuck retorted with acidity.

The afflicted man’s skin was
grey and wrinkled, not from age but from the rapid necrosis. If the cows did not find him, falling apart through cellular decay, through being unable to ingest food, would be his certain fate. The group left him behind, lurching hopelessly this way and that in the middle of the road, bumping into cars.

At long last
, and with great relief, they reached the point where Kings Drive met Lacey Drive, and just beyond the corner of the crossroads, they saw rising high above, Salisbury Court, some thirteen storeys high. There were several other towers and shorter blocks of flats. All were constructed from dreary grey concrete and were filthy with age.

The car parks and grass between the blocks were littered with shopping trolleys, a broken child’s buggy, a wet stinking mattress and other discarded items. In the gutter there lay a dead dog, half its face missing, its fur matted and dirty. Muz found himself wondering, possibly a little dramatically, whether the dog would have still been there even if the current situation had not been what it was. This was the Stonegrove, one of the
shittiest of north London’s estates.

It had taken Muz a whole day and a half to walk his way here from where he had originally been dropped off in Mill Hill by his Sergeant in the carrier. It was a journey that, on any normal day
, would have been no more than a ten-minute drive.

The
scene was devoid of movement, save for a plastic child’s ball rolling slowly along and the ravens that squawked and fought among themselves. The carrion-eaters with their beady black eyes had gathered in unprecedented numbers to feed on the dead. Their pickings here were very slim however, and they squabbled over the corpse of the canine. It seemed that the cows left little at all in the wake of their slaughter.

T
hough the birds had been eating the flesh of the infected for some time, not one of them had succumbed to the cross-species affliction. The information transfer normally passed by the artificially encoded cells had no effect on them. The de-coding stem cell spread was limited purely to mammals, due to the specific nature of Doctor Raj Shah’s fine-tuned genetic manipulation.

At the base of
Salisbury Court, a window of one of the ground floor flats had been left ajar and the group could hear a TV blaring away to itself within. The flat had to be unoccupied. No one in his or her right mind would allow the volume to be so high.

“Traffic chaos,” a voice from the telly was blurting out, “
surrounding the unknown outbreak in north London has brought routes through both central London and surrounding counties almost to a complete standstill. Drivers are advised to avoid attempting to travel on such roads, particularly the M1, closed south of junction three, the A1, closed south of junction two, the A5, the A406 North Circular and the M25 between junctions twenty-one and twenty-six. A road safety official told us earlier that before road users embark...”

Muz found solace in the man’s voice. His fears had begun to run wild and he had found himself fretting that the epidemic was coursing across the whole of England now. The TV report however confirmed that it was still only confined to a portion of London; his family were still safe.