Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (45 page)

“Seen anything interesting?” Muz asked casually.

Carl shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, slicking it back out of his eyes.

“How you feeling today?” Muz then asked, allowing a little compassion to break through a crack in his now hardened shell.

“I really need to get back to work,” Carl told him. “This has gone on for too long now. The CEO is going to kill me if I’m not back in soon.”

“What?” Muz asked in response. “You’re telling me that your main concern is that it’s going to be your boss that’s going to kill you?”

“Figure of speech.”

They heard the door open behind them and looked back to see Chuck stepping out.

“Hey,” the overweight soldier said, a steaming hot mug of coffee in one hand and a packet of fags in the other.

The other two men nodded curtly at him
, and after no more than a couple of minutes of standing there in uncomfortable silence, they went back inside, leaving Chuck alone.

In the flat
, the others were all beginning to stir. Margaret was up and had made a pot of coffee. Sipping from a cup she gave him, Muz’s brow raised in surprise.

“Nutmeg,” the woman said.

Muz nodded at her in gratitude.

“So, where do we go from here?” were the first words out of Amy’s mouth.

Though the little woman was attempting to look stern in the hope that a to-the-point attitude would get her a solid answer, Muz found it difficult to take her seriously with the dog licking her bare feet. The man’s nose crinkled a little in disgust on seeing the animal’s huge slobbery tongue cleaning between her toes.

“Well,” the copper replied, without really knowing what to say. “I guess Chuck has a point.”

“What?” Amy blurted back. “So, we’re just giving up?”

“No..
.,” Muz said, still struggling with how to reply when he didn’t really have an answer. “I laid awake last night thinking about what happened yesterday, and to be honest, Chuck was right; trying to get through the cordon would be suicide.” It pained him to admit it and he felt a little childish in knowing that, if Chuck had been in the room, there would have been no way he would have conceded the point.

“So, we’re just giving up then,” Amy stated bitterly.

“We stay?” Tom asked, having emerged from the bathroom midway through Muz and Amy’s exchange.

“We… just need to give it a little time,” Muz replied wearily. “Watch how things play out.”

Amy shook her head and looked as though she were about to say something else, but Chuck stepped back through the door and she held her tongue.

The fat African man walked through the living room to the hallway without acknowledging anyone. He went to the front door and opened it, leaving the barred caged locked in place. Standing there a while, holding
onto the bars and leaning his head against them, he listened for any sounds. There was nothing but silence, nothing to suggest their ground floor barrier had been breached and someone had made their way up the stairs. He did however catch something that made him scowl in disgust.

“That stink down on the sixth floor is starting to filter up here,” Chuck told the group on returning to the living room.

The others lifted their heads from the mugs they were coveting, in order to look up at him but no one said anything in return.

“
So the first thing we need to do today,” the big man said, full of authority, “is get those two bodies out of that flat, out of the block, and burn them.”

“I really can’t go back in there,” Carl said.

“We have to,” Chuck told him decisively. “I know that, given the poor state they’re in, there’s no chance of them attacking us, but we’ve got to think about disease. Besides, if we leave them in there much longer, that smell is going to become unbearable, even up here.”

The thought of having to try
to tolerate that foul stink for more than a few minutes was enough for the others to agree with Chuck. Muz volunteered to go with the man, as did Amy, who had been intrigued by the rapid rate of decomposition she had seen and wanted to examine the bodies further.

“I’m coming as well,” Jay said. He was painfully aware that the others in the group thought of him as a boy and was eager to prove them wrong.

“You really don’t have to,” Amy told him, wanting to protect him from seeing such horror at his age, especially after all he had been through already.

“No, let him
come,” Chuck said, refusing to allow her to mollycoddle the boy.

“Carl, you can come as well,” Muz said. “We’re going to need another strong back to carry the bodies. No offence, Amy.”

Carl huffed and grumbled to himself.

“I am good to carry,” Tom said.

“Cheers, mate,” Muz thanked him.

In the end, only Margaret elected to remain in the flat with Digby, saying that she would have a cooked breakfast waiting for them all when they got back.

“Just make sure that thing doesn’t get at the sausages,” Chuck warned her, pointing at the dog who was obliviously cleaning his nether regions.

With that, they
got themselves together and prepared to leave the flat. Chuck offered to lock Margaret inside, so that she would feel safe, but the elderly woman declined.

“Without wishing to imply that you might not return,” she said, “
if anything were to happen to all of you, I would be trapped. Besides which, I have Digby here to take care of me.”

She rubbed the dog’s head and he looked up at her with gormless eyes.

The three men, the little woman and the boy headed down the communal stairs of the block. They emerged onto the sixth floor and approached the flat where they had found the dead husband and wife. The door stood slightly ajar, as they had left it and, as they gathered just outside, bracing themselves against the smell, they heard a single soft thump from within.

“Did anyone else hear that?” Carl asked nervously.

The others nodded back at him silently, straining to listen for any further noises. None came, but still, they were now very reluctant to step foot over the threshold.

“Let’s just get inside and get this done with,” Chuck said
, pulling the neck of his T-shirt up over his nose.

With weapons held at the ready, one by one they stepped inside. Still wondering as to what had been the sou
rce of that sound, they slowly and tentatively checked each room they passed. Though they fully expected to be set upon by a crazed cannibal at any given moment, they came across nothing of concern.

Even at the end of the hallway, in the living room, they found nothing more violent than the rank stench that assaulted their sense of smell.
Still seated on the sofa in front of them were the corpses of the man and woman. Whereas they day before, they had been barely recognisable as the same people as those in the photos decorating the room, they were now barely recognisable as ever having been human.

The woman had decomposed
noticeably in the span of just one day. The organs and entrails dangling from the gaping cavity of her stomach had withered and shrivelled. The day previous, her body had been swollen with fluids. Now that they had all but completely drained out of her onto the carpet, her grey skin looked at least two sizes too large for her. It was wrinkled and paper thin. Her eyelids, having dried out, had peeled back from her eyes, revealing them to be rolled up in resignation of her fate. She made no movement, not so much as a twitch.

It was the man beside her that was the most interesting though, certainl
y to Amy at least. His putrefaction had taken a different path. Almost all the soft tissue of the corpse, including the skin, had broken down into an amber-coloured goo. He was now no more than a snotty mass festering on the sofa. Inside the acidic-smelling slime, the group could see the man’s bare bones still intact and the intricate network of nerves surrounding them. The only parts of his body that had not turned to mush were his eyes, motionless and rolled up in the sockets of his skull, just like those of his wife.

The carpel and metacarpal bones of the man’s left hand were still holding onto the hand of his spouse. Her arm had thus been partially encased in the snot of his body. Looking closer, it looked like this was causing the flesh of the woman’s limb to break down in the same manner as that of the man.

A small ceramic ballerina, which had, judging by the dust marks, been situated on the shelf above the gas fire in the room, had fallen to the floor, causing her neck to snap and her head to roll free. Had it been that way yesterday, Muz wondered. Or had this been the source of the sound they had just heard?

“Something’s not right,” Muz said, whispering unnecessarily.

“You think?” Chuck asked sarcastically. “You should be in CID.”

“Amy, what do you make of this?” Muz asked the paramedic, completely ignoring Chuck.

The woman didn’t respond, so transfixed was she by the unusual nature of what she was observing. She dared to step closer.

“Maybe this
… is a good sign,” Carl managed to spit out, swallowing down a rising compulsion to vomit. “These two are the deadest we’ve seen yet.”

“Innit,” Jay agreed. “Maybe
the others will all end up like dis, die proper, rot n’ shit, n’ stop chasing us.”

“This is not just an aggressively accelerated rate of decay,” Amy said now, her eyes still captivated by the lump of snot and bones on the sofa. “This is something… different.”

“Maybe is only few more days before all are same, like this,” Tom said. “And this bad dream is finished.”

“Look at those cords branching out from the vertebrae,” Amy told the others. “That’s the nervous system still intact. Why hasn’t that undergone the same process?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Carl said, “but I don’t think you should be getting close to it.”

He stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder to pull her back.
Amy looked back from her stooped position and smiled at him for being so nervous and yet so protective.

“I think this particular zombie, as you like to call them, is long beyond being able to attack anyone. There’
s nothing left of him, you fool,” she mocked.

Carl looked more than little embarrassed, as the woman continued to grin at him.
Still eying the remains of the man behind her though, he thought he saw some of the strands of nerves within the jelly begin to move.

At that very moment, the eyes of the bare skull
within the acidic snot rolled forward to regard the group. A tendril of stinking wet goo, encasing a twisted rope of nerves, shot upwards out of the mucus-like mass, reaching for Amy’s throat.

Carl managed to lunge forward and shoved Amy out of the way. The tentacle snapped through the air, missing her by no more than a couple of inches. It then instantly changed its intended target and thrashed at Carl. The whipping arm caught him by the neck and wrapped itself around until it had hold of him. Yanking back towards the main body of the jellified goo, the tentacle
pulled Carl off balance and he fell to the carpeted floor. As he fought wildly, his arms and legs thrashing in the drying crusty puddle of the dead woman’s innards, the tendril constricted tighter about his throat. His eyes bulged and the veins in his neck and temples swelled.

“Holy Christ,” Muz yelled in shock.

Chuck and Tom grabbed Carl’s legs and pulled, attempting to drag him free. The thrashing arm was too strong though and no matter how hard the two big men yanked, the snotty limb did not relinquish its grip. The jellified mass on the sofa changed its shape, bracing itself down the back of the seat and against the frame of the arm.

Jay ran forward and repeatedly kicked at the thick tentacle. It did nothing to help
, and when he felt the trainer he had used stick to the carpet, he lifted it to see that the rubber of the sole was melting.

Amy dropped to her knees beside Carl’s head and he looked up at her plaintively, barely any sound able to escape his gaping mouth. She grabbed at the end of the twisted tentacle and tried to uncoil it but instead
, screamed in pain. Letting go, she looked at her hands. The palms were red raw and already beginning to blister. She then drew from her belt the hatchet she had borrowed from Margaret and chopped at the boneless limb. It writhed furiously in response, but refused to let go of Carl’s neck, still fighting against Chuck and Tom. Amy was distraught to see that each time she cut a gouge into the goo of the arm, as soon as she retracted the hatchet, the snot just reformed itself.

Chuck was already sweating profusely and growling against the strain of his muscles while trying his damnedest not to start coughing. Despite his
and Tom’s best efforts, their feet were sliding forward on the carpet. They were losing the fight.

It wasn’t long before the thick tendril had pulled Carl back to the main mass and the top of his head
was being absorbed by the lump. His thick silver hair rapidly dissolved and the skin of his scalp began to bubble. A snaking string of nerves emerged from the surface of the goo by the man’s head, entered his gaping mouth, and forced themselves down his throat.