Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (35 page)

“Okay, let’s get inside,” Chuck decided, heading towards the tower.

“Why don’t we just keep heading for the cordon?” Carl asked, feeling the need the escape this madness more than ever. “It can’t possibly be much farther now and we’ve made it this far.”

“Margaret’s in a bad state,” Muz told him, “and Amy’s like catnip to those people at the minute. Let’s just get up to the top of this block, have a rest, see what we can see and then go from there.”

Carl shrugged grumpily and followed the copper.

“Besides,” Muz continued to say, “I know it sounds daft, but it’s too quiet.”

He didn’t normally use the ‘Q’ word while on duty
, but it just slipped out and he winced in response. It was a police superstition that as soon as someone said it, all hell would break loose. He was as bad as Chuck with his irrational beliefs, he told himself.

“Are you saying you’d prefer to see more of those zombies staggering about the place?” Carl asked.

“No, of course not. It’s just that these streets are so dead it’s making me nervous.”

Just as Muz
said this, the two men walking at the rear of the group heard a loud bang from above. They both instantly turned their heads up in the direction of the sound and saw a window of one of the seventh floor flats still flexing in its frame. Then they saw, even higher up, someone slam against another pane. Carl and Muz looked back at each other. The cows had cleared the streets for them but mad cannibals were still lurking in the blocks. And, it seemed, they been had stirred into animation by the sight of the succulent band of survivors.

“Oh please, not again,” was all Muz could say.

The rest of the group ahead of them had also stopped and were looking upward at the rising grey slab of the block. Before anyone of them could have any further reaction though, the seventh floor window smashed and out fell a man, snarling, arms and legs flailing.

“Holy mother of God,” Carl cried out, as the man slammed with unbelievable force into paving slabs of the path no more than three feet in front of him.

Clots of congealed blood and pieces of meat burst free of the man’s body and spattered the pathway and grass, along with the shards of broken glass. Despite having broken both legs, an arm, and his breastbone, the madman was still moving. Using his one remaining good arm, he pulled himself up onto the shattered remains of his thighs, the rest of his tattered legs trailing behind him, and began to scuttle towards Carl on the three limbs. Despite being a macabre mess of twisted body parts, he was still concerned only with reaching the food standing before him.

There then came the repeated sound of shattering glass, as, without a moment’s thought for his safety or the pain he would surely suffer, a
second man threw himself out of a window. He too hit the ground with a horrible crunch.

“Dumb bastards,” Carl said, holding his knife ready.

As the broken remains of the first jumper, hissing through his teeth in utter agony, pulled himself slowly forward, Carl stepped to one side and drove his blade into the back of his neck. The knife slipped between two vertebrae and cleanly severed the spinal cord. The man slumped, incapable of any further coordinated action.

“Get away from the block,” Chuck called out, as there came yet another crash from above and another body hit the grass to their left.

“Tak. Ladies to move back,” Tom agreed, ushering Amy and Margaret backwards.

“Look at this,” Muz said to Carl, distracted by what he saw at his feet. “This thing is moving.”

Inching along the ground, edging its way towards him was a little lump of clotted blood. Chuck came over and saw what he was looking at.

“Explain that,” the big man challenged the copper.

Muz failed to respond, simply staring down in wide eyed disbelief at the lump of maroon blood dragging itself along with slug-like locomotion.

All the
while, there came sounds of further shattering, as more and more bodies rained down amid broken glass around them. Most, as a result of their fall, were far too badly injured to be of much concern, but as the human downpour continued, some had their fall broken by other bodies and they suffered less as a consequence.

On top of this, the group heard the raging din of screaming coming from the open doors and the stairwell beyond. Seconds later, more crazies came staggering out the entrance, ravenous for flesh. The first of these, the survivors were pleased to see, was struck down mid-stride by a falling body. Those behind him however trod on both, lurching forward with full haste.
Thus, the group again found themselves outnumbered amid the throng of a fight.

Disturbed from their search for morsels of bloody remains, the ravens leapt up into the air. The chorus of their dry calls was so loud it was as though they were spurring on the onrushing attackers.

Amy immediately grabbed Digby by the collar again, as he began to lunge forward to protect her. She also kept close by Margaret’s side, taking hold of her upper arm. With both her hands thus occupied, she hoped the men would be able to protect her.

Margaret had ceased her low muttering
, but still, she didn’t seem as though she was altogether there. If the woman took off again, leaving the relative safety of the group, she might not be so lucky as to evade the attentions of their attackers a second time.

Doing their best to put themselves between the women and the onrushing psychos, the four men swung for all they were worth with their various instruments of death. Chuck and Tom again seemed to be dropping the majority of the ensuing crowd. This wasn’t just down to their superior strength and seemingly fearless vigour. Their blunt weapons, the candlestick
, and the hammer, were much more effective than the other two men’s stabbing weapons. Both Carl’s knife and Muz’s rail spike, when plunged into someone, would sometimes get caught on bone or cartilage and it took valuable seconds and precious energy to rip them free. Taking note, Muz drew his baton. With a weapon in each hand, he felt more confident.

Still, all four of them together were doing a fair job of holding off the mass of people. Each of them was becoming frighteningly efficient at stopping a crazed person in their tracks, and stopping them permanently. Chuck in particular found he had more energy than he had felt in years, as he allowed his anger to well within him.

“Why are you only killing the black ones?” Chuck shouted at Carl, as he saw him first stab a ten-year-old Somalian girl and then turn to hack at the neck of a Caribbean looking man with silver hair.

“I’m killing the ones… that are nearest and look… the most dangerous,” Carl responded indignantly
and out of breath.

“
Did that little girl look the most dangerous to you?” Chuck pushed him.

“Hey, she was bloody fast.”

“So you’re saying it’s just coincidence that all the people you’ve dropped so far are black?” Chuck asked, smashing a white guy so hard in the temple with his candlestick that the man’s eye actually protruded from its socket.

“They’re not,” Carl protested. “That man I took down before the girl… the fat fuck… he was white.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“He was… He only looks black because… he’s so rotten… And what about her? She’s green.”

He wasn’t wrong. The five foot three woman wearing a dressing gown and fluffy slippers, who had to be in her eighties, was decaying so badly that all her visible skin was a pallid yellow-green. In fact, many of their assailants were so rotten that the group found themselves struggling to breathe and not vomit. The stench filling their nostrils was almost overpowering.

Stood beside
Carl and Chuck, Muz tried to ignore their bickering and concentrate on staying alive. He could barely believe that either of them had the energy or composure to engage in discourse at a time like this.

A young skinny man with a large tattoo of a dragon drawn across his ribs came at the copper. He was one of the faster ones
, lightning fast, and looked as though he had probably only recently turned, having had a chunk of his throat bitten out. The bony man was on Muz before he could react and he bit down hard on his stab vest. Even when his actions caused two of his upper incisors to work loose, the man continued to bite down.  Muz was thankful that he had decided to continue wearing the heavy vest all this time. There had been many a time, particularly when it caused his lower back to ache, that he had wanted to unzip the thing and throw it off.

Seeing Muz was struggling badly under the force of the skeletal man’s frenzy, Tom thundered over to him. Without so much as a pause, he turned his hammer in his hand, so that the claw faced forward
, and rammed the prongs into the side of the skinny man’s head, using the implement like a hook to drag him off Muz. He then tore the hammer free and beat him over and over until he stopped moving.

That was twice now the stocky P
ole had saved his life, Muz thought gratefully.

“You’re a racist mother fucker,” he heard
Chuck say to Carl. They were still at it.

“If anyone’s racist… it’s you,” Carl said, still giving some back.

“Why?”

“Because you clearly think… all white men are racist. That’s racist.”

“That’s ’cos you’re all racist pricks.” Chuck’s killing fury was full blown now and he was using Carl to keep him going.

“See… I told you.”

“I’ve met a lot of nice white women though,” Chuck went on, finding a brief half second to turn to Carl with a grin. “Real nice.”

“Fuck you,” Carl spat back.

“Fuck you too, you white racist prick.”

“You do realise that’s… inherently… hypocritical… Don’t you?”

As out of place as the dialogue seemed to the others amid this fight for survival, it worked for Carl as much as it did Chuck, serving to distance himself a little from his desperate plight and from the horrific wounds he was inflicting on the people who were trying to surround them.

Chuck didn’t normally play the stereotypical role of the black guy with a chip on his shoulder. He had nothing against white people. It was just that
he was sure he sensed a little hidden racist element in Carl.

“This is what I’ve always loved about working in Barnet,” Muz said, unable to stop himself from joining in, as he kicked the person he was currently wrestling with in the gut and stabbed him deep in the nasal cavity.

“What’s that?” Chuck asked.

“The integration of such rich cultural diversity,” the copper answered.

Amy, absolutely terrified now, had dragged Margaret down into a squatting position, hidden behind the men, hugged both the woman and Digby as tight as she could. The dog was going totally crazy, barking his head off, and it was quite literally all she could do to keep hold of him.

Tom, unable to concentrate enough to decipher what the other men were talking about
, while at the same time focusing on the fight, continued to battle on in virtual silence. He dropped back a few steps, seeing that some of the undead were beginning to flank them, and turned his attention on those attackers who were in danger of getting to the females.

One particularly fetid looking man
with bedraggled hair and a greying beard ran at Carl while he was struggling to pull his knife free from someone’s ribs. The hairy madman in nothing but Y-fronts was one of the more rotten of the horde, his skin darkening from yellow-green to blue-brown. Carl couldn’t pry the knife loose in time before the cannibal was on him. All he could think to do instead was duck and ram his head into the man’s stomach. It was not a good idea.

As he bent his head forward and the raging decomposing man slammed into him, his head actually penetrated his attacker’s abdomen, his rotten skin tearing easily. With his he
ad fully buried within the stomach, Carl pressed both hands against the man’s body and pushed back as hard as he could. He managed to dislodge his now wet stinking head, but wrapped tight around his neck were the bearded man’s entrails. As Carl panicked and choked, the guts only wrapped tighter still about his throat. He slumped to the ground, dragging the bearded man down by his own exposed intestines.

Wrestling in the grass with the unravelling man, he found himself facing the other’s crotch at close quarters
. In his panicked frenzy, he grabbed at the bloodied Y-fronts, unintentionally yanking them down around the man’s upper thighs. Shockingly, he then saw that there was nothing more than a chewed mess of a cavity where his penis and gonads had once been. Carl felt bile rising with a sudden rush from his stomach and had his throat not been so forcefully constricted, he would have vomited directly into the other man’s pelvic cavity. With his brain starved of oxygen, he blacked out.

Muz came to his aid. He stomped repeatedly on the bearded man’s hairy head and stabbed at his neck. Only when the rail spike had all but removed the head from the rest of the body did he stop and try to pull
the guts from around Carl’s throat. The man in the custody clothes had gone pale and his lower lip was decidedly blue with cyanosis.

Muz struggled frantically but the entrails were so tight and slimy that he could barely keep his hold on them. He began to despair, his efforts having no effect. Then he saw Carl’s knife in the grass. He picked it up and as rapidly as he dare, cut through
the wet grey tubes. Stinking shit spilled out and Muz wretched violently but didn’t stop cutting, though he could barely see through the water welling in his eyes. Finally, he sliced through the last strand and Carl slid free. His neck was a deep purple and he wasn’t moving.