Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (55 page)

Raj leapt out past him, landing in the road on all fours. Not wanting to try
to breach the wall of flames, he turned and loped on hands and feet to the front of the Jankel, to face the second monstrous jelly. With his refined sense of smell, the acidic stench coming from the amoeboid creature was almost overpowering. It was dangerously close now.

“What the hell are you doing?” Muz demanded, opening his door slightly.

“I have a hypoth...,” Raj began to say, as a sticky wet tendril snapped out at him.

The huge boneless limb caught him round the chest, wrapping itself so tight around him that he was unable to breath
e. As soon as its hold on its prey was secure, the writhing arm pulled back, wrenching Raj through the air towards the body of the beast.

Raj, flailing like a rag doll, slapped hard against the surface of the goo. His eyes lost their terrible glare
, as they widened with fear. He splayed his arms and legs, bracing himself and spreading his body weight, trying not to allow the creature to draw him into itself. It was no use though; he was rapidly absorbed into the undulating mass. At the last moment, he screwed the lids of his eyes tight and pursed his lips shut, as the vile treacle enveloped his face.

Those in the Jankel watched, transfixed in horror, expecting to see the man’s skin begin to burn and blister. It didn’t however. After several seconds of sinking deeper and deeper into the sopping pile
, he still appeared to remain unharmed. Then the huge mass stopped moving towards the truck. It shuddered violently, paused then shuddered again.

Then, emanating from Raj close to its centre, cracks seemed to form in the li
quid. The mass juddered and quaked more and more violently. An arm thrust out with frightening speed from the main body at the Jankel. It wasn’t one of the mucus tendrils though but rather a solid shard. The splitting cracks continued to spread outward within the mass. More crystal-like shards thrust outward. One hit the truck, pushing between and bending its heavy bull-bars, piercing the radiator.

In less than a
minute, the amoeboid creature was no longer fluid at all. Instead, it resembled a crystalline volcanic geode and was just as motionless. Riddled with fractures that compromised its structural integrity, it fell to pieces. From within the crystal rumble, out slumped Raj, apparently just as dead as the blob now was.

“
Whoa,” Muz gasped in astonishment.

With the acidic mass no longer a threat, Muz dared to edge the Jankel forward towards where Raj lay. The radiator hissed in protest and the wheels crunched over chunks of amber crystals. The Indian man still wasn’t moving. Muz opened his door.

“What are you doing?” Chuck said. “Leave him. He’s dead. We have to go.”

“He’s been dead before,” Muz told the big man. “We need to get him.”

“Blob number two is coming,” Tom informed them from by the rear doors. “Is close. We need to leave now.”

“He saved us,” Muz said, jumping down out of the truck. “Don’t you drive away.”

Muz knelt by Raj’s side, brushing crystal shards off the man before daring to touch him. The Doctor’s jaw hung limp and his half-lidded eyes were unfocused and still.

“Get back in here or I’m leaving you,” Chuck shouted, panic all too evident in his voice.

“Somebody help me pick him up,” the copper called out, as he struggled to lift the Indian man’s dead weight.

Annoyed and afraid, Chuck jumped down and helped Muz throw Raj’s limp body up onto the front seats. Amy and Sam reached through from the rear and dragged him back, while Tom continued to launch burning projectiles.

A tentacle slapped the back of the Jankel and Tom fell back in fright. Scrabbling onto his hands and knees, he reached out and pulled the doors shut.

“Okay. We go now,” h
e stated urgently.

Muz drove the battered truck forward, tyres and a bare rim screaming against the road. A steaming cloud spewing from the radiator made it difficult to see where he was going but he sped away regardless. As he drove around the geode, the front left corner of the truck struck the rocky pile, buckling the bodywork and sending small shards spraying through the air and clattering down the road.

“Wait. Stop,” Chuck shouted.

Muz stamped hard on the brake, fearing that the man had seen another danger he himself had not yet spotted. Chuck was looking back through the side mirror attached to his door.

“That second blob isn’t coming after us anymore,” he said, opening his door and leaning out to look behind them.

“So?” Muz asked.

Chuck was right. The huge mucus monster was behind the enormous geode, not daring to pass it. Its wet tendrils slowly reached out to its dead twin, tentatively almost touching it before drawing back rapidly.

“I think it’s afraid of it,” Chuck declared.

“So?” Muz asked.

“Maybe it does have a level of intelligence, like Raj said,” Amy suggested. “Maybe it’s afraid of contracting whatever it was that Raj did to the other one.”

“Yeah, so?” Muz asked, frustrated and wanting to drive off.

“So,” Chuck explained. “We don’t know if or when we might run into another one of those things again. It might be worth picking up some of the pieces to keep as a deterrent.”

As Muz was pondering this, he heard the unmistakable heavy chopping of rotor blades again. This time it wasn’t a British Sea King. Looking up, he saw the sleek form of a Black Hawk emerge from over the far side of the A5. Moving into position directly above, it hovered some thirty feet over the remains of the blob Raj had somehow managed to kill.

Seconds later, under the covering fire of door-mounted flame throwers that kept the second amoeboid creature at bay, six men in black suits, helmets, goggles and respirators rapidly descended down ropes. Chuck had seen the high tech’ extremely specialist kit they were dressed in a few times before, on missions that officially never took place. The soldiers were American Special Ops.

As one, they hit the ground and immediately formed a tight circle around the crumbling crystalline pile, still attached to the helicopter above by the ropes that were clipped to their chest harnesses. Swinging their assault rifles around from their backs, they adopted kneeling fire positions and pointed them warily at the retreating creature.

Once they were in position, one of their
numbers signalled upwards, and in response, three more men in white contamination suits were winched down to the ground with far less grace and efficiency. Finding their footing, they then nervously and hurriedly set about the task of obtaining crystal samples.

Two of the men in white worked together to pick up half of a human skeleton, still partially encased in a solidified lump of the dead amoeba monster. They placed it in what looked to those watching from the Jankel to be a high-tech body bag. Sealing the bag and switching on an extraction fan caused the bag to vacuum form around the sample, crinkling as it squeezed tight around the bare ribs and skull.

These men were not the dumb Marines they had faced on the cordon line, Chuck thought. Maybe they would listen to what he had to say. He clambered between the front seat into the rear of the Jankel and grabbed Sam by the arm.

“Come with me,” the big man said.

Sam pulled back reluctantly and looked to Amy for help. The little woman avoided his eyes. Chuck pulled him to his feet and kicked open the rear doors. He pushed the recovering ex-zombie out and jumped down after him. Again taking hold of Sam by one arm, he began to march him over to where the men were working.

“Unknown variables closing on your six,” one of the soldiers said, his voice muffled by his respirator.

“What?” one of the white clad scientists replied.

“Behind you,” the soldier told him.

The scientist spun around nervously to see the two men walking towards him and dropped a glass sample jar in panic.

“Get back,” said the muffled voice of one of the men in the black combats.

“I just want to show you...,” Chuck began to say, continuing to walk forwards.

“Stay back or I will use lethal force,” the soldier said even more sternly, levelling his weapon at the black man.

Muz, Amy and Tom watched fearfully from the truck.

“Just listen to me,” Chuck demanded, matching the man’s vocal aggression but now standing still.

“Shit,” the soldier said then, on noticing the deformities of the zombie at the big man’s side.

He pointed his rifle at Sam’s head then and looked through the sights, as did the other soldiers. Sam cowered in response.

“No! Don’t shoot. He’s important,” Chuck shouted, stepping in front of the zombie who dropped to his knees. “My name is Colour sergeant Chi…”

There was a sudden loud crack, as one of the soldiers opened fire.
The high velocity round struck Chuck square in the face and the back of his head exploded in a shower of blood. He remained standing, as pieces of brain tissue and fragments of skull rained down onto the road and Sam. Then he fell forward, slamming limp, face first into the road.

“No!” Tom yelled and jumped out the rear of the Jankel.

Digby broke free of Amy’s grip and leapt out the open rear doors in close second to the Polish man. Not comprehending that it was already too late, the dog raced fearlessly to Chuck’s assistance. He had come to regard the big black man as one of his pack now and was ready to defend him to the death.

“No!” Amy screamed, falling out of the back of the truck after her furry friend.

“We’re good,” one of the scientists in white shouted with a thumbs-up at the soldiers.

All but ignoring the onrushing survivors, a soldier
looked up and gave the winch men a hand gesture. Their lifelines snapped taught and all nine of the men were yanked into the air by whirring motors that spooled the ropes. As they were drawn rapidly upwards, the helicopter pilot didn’t wait for them to be back on board before banking towards the western cordon line.

One of the soldiers pointed his rifle down at the ground directly at Digby and fired off a couple of rounds. With him swinging wildly in the air though, the bullets struck the tarmac well wide of their target. The dog jumped furiously, barking and baring his teeth.

Tom Lunged forward to where Chuck lay in a rapidly spreading pool of thick blood that was pumping from his gaping cranial cavity. Pulling the handgun from where it was tucked into the dead man’s beltline, he aimed it up at the dangling men and fired repeatedly. After four shots, the weapon’s slide remained locked back in the rear position, showing it to be empty.

More by luck than good aim, two of the soldiers suspended beneath the banking helicopter hung limp now. The other men in black opened fire
, but Tom was already diving for cover behind the engine block of the Range Rover.

“Dla mnie zona i syn,” he shouted furiously, curled up behind the car, a tear spilling down one cheek.

Dizzy with adrenaline and fear, Amy caught up to Digby, as the dog continued to chase along the road after the helicopter. Thankfully, the hip dysplasia that was common in the two breeds he had been bred from severely limited his top speed. The woman grabbed him in a wrestling hold around his waist and dragged him to the ground, as he continued to bark ferociously at the dangling soldiers now high above.

Bullets continued to rain down all around, pinging off walls an
d shattering car windows. Amy then felt herself knocked backwards with such force that she thought she had been hit by an invisible heavyweight boxer.

Instinctively covering the pain in her shoulder with her opposite hand, she felt the area was sticky and wet. Lifting the hand to her eyes, she saw it was drenched with blood. As shock clouded her mind, it took her more than ten shaky breaths to realise that she had been shot. She slumped back against the road, lying flat and staring up at the sky.

She saw the helicopter disappear over the roofs, leaving nothing in her vision but blue sky and grey clouds. It was beautifully serine, she thought happily.

Spoiling the view, the heads of Muz, Tom and Sam appeared around her. The two of them that were able to do so were shouting at her, demanding her attention, but she wasn’t interested in anything they had to say. She just wanted to be left to look up at the clouds.

“We must stop bleeding,” Tom said urgently.

“Get her in the truck first,” Muz told him, already beginning to lift the limp woman
in his arms. “We need to get back to the flat. It’s the only safe place.”

Amy smiled and reached up to caress the police officer’s face.

Chapter 16

Colonel Grieves

Having once more abandoned the vir
tually ruined Jankel on the grass by the doors, the few remaining survivors hurried back into the block. They no longer had any kind of plan. They just knew that they had to get off the streets, away from the zombies, away from that blob and up above the impending chemical attack.

Laboriously making their way up through the stairwell, Tom and Sam dragged the unconscious – possibly dead – Raj between them, while Muz carried Amy in his arms. The weight of the little but chubby woman was preying heavily on his legs and lungs
, but she was in no fit state to walk. She was barely even conscious, moaning deliriously in pain with her head lolling against his chest. Digby walked at the police officer’s side, looking anxiously up at the woman and whining under his breath.

The paramedic only had a blood soaked bra to cover her breasts.
While Muz had struggled with the truck to get them back to the tower, Tom and Sam had torn off the woman’s Jumper and T-shirt to reveal her bullet wound. Finding a padded bandage in the Jankel’s first aid box, they had done their best to dress the wound and stem the copious flow of blood.

The rifle round had struck the woman in the shoulder. Although it had cut through the t
op of her pectoral and latissimus muscles, it appeared to have passed clean through without splitting bone or rupturing an artery. So long as the bleeding didn’t start up again, she should be okay.

Above the panting and grunting of their own exertions, the men heard a sound from above. It was the noise of scrabbling claws on concrete and a rasping snarl, amplified by the bare walls. As o
ne, they stopped on the stairs and strained to listen beyond Amy’s moaning and Digby’s whining.

They heard the eerie snarl again.

“Brilliant,” Muz sighed in utter exasperation. Did the shit never end?

“Sounds like animal,” Tom stated the obvious.

“Yeah. It’s probably following our scent up to the top floor. You lot wait here and look after Amy and Raj. I’ll go check it out,” Muz told the others, depositing the heavy woman on the cold floor in a bend between two flights.

“I come with you,” Tom offered.

“No,” Muz told him. “No. Stay here with these lot and keep a hold of the dog. I don’t want him biting anything and getting infected. Amy would kill us all if anything happened to him. Whatever is up there has got to be far more dead than alive now. I’ll be fine.”

He headed off up the stairs alone, cricket bat in hand. He couldn’t get the image of Chuck’s head exploding out of his mind. It was yet another horrifying memory that would torture his dreams. Despite the man’s obesity, out of all of them, Muz would have thought that if anyone were to survive this
, it would have been him. He’d possessed a grim determination and practical military knowledge and skills, he had been strong and had seemed to find killing easy, both physically and mentally.

Three floors up from where he had left the others, Muz’s thoughts were still absorbed by the big man’s bloody death when he rounded the next corner. Before he realised it, he was face to face with half a fox that, halfway up the flight in front of him, was above him. The animal, though missing its pelvis and hind limbs, launched itself at him. The shrill scream it made was ear splitting, like that of a young girl in a state of pure terror.

Three floors below, the others heard that awful cry, followed by the frenzied sounds of snarling and shouting. Then it went silent.

“That not sound good,” Tom said to Sam.

The mute shook his head in agreement.

Digby began to whine even more loudly. He licked his jowls and pulled against the collar Tom was holding him by. Though they continued to listen, there were no further sounds from above.

Eventually, Muz’s head reappeared round the corner of the top of the stairs ahead of them and he waved his blood drenched bat.

“It’s clear,” he said, looking thoroughly worn out, a sheen of sweat glistening on his brow. “It was just half a fox. I’m surprised it managed to get so far up here with only two front legs.”

Though he tried to sound nonchalant, it was clear to the other men that the fight with the animal had drained him of what little drive he had managed to keep in reserve. He looked as though he were teetering on the edge of completing giving up.

The copper trod heavily back down to them and tried to gather the limp Amy back into his arms. He simply no longer had the energy though.

“Stand back,” Tom told him. “I carry. You help Sam.”

Muz nodded gratefully and instead passed his head under one of Raj’s arms. Thankfully, in stark contrast to Muz, Sam seemed to be growing stronger and more filled with vitality by the hour. The recovering zombie shouldered the majority of Raj’s weight and Muz was grateful for it.

They continued to head upwards, each step a challenge. Passing the remains of what had been the fox, Muz averted his eyes. The copper had beaten it almost to a pulp. The animal looked like road kill that had been hit by several cars, a mess of blood and fur that was barely recognisable as the animal it had once been. Muz had clearly carried on beating it long after it had ceased to pose a threat, Tom saw.

The Pole caught Sam’s eyes, as he to
o saw what Muz had done. Nothing was said however. If mutilating the fox had helped the copper to exorcise his bitter anger, then it was all to the good.

At long last, they reached the thirteenth floor and
entered their dingy flat. Muz locked the cage behind them and in the living room, they deposited Amy and Raj side by side on the sofa. Muz, his face a deathly drained white, ignoring everyone, slumped into an armchair and sat staring at the blank face of the shattered TV screen.

Sam brought Amy a cup of cold water and urged her to sip at it, while Tom checked that her dressings were working to stop the bleeding. At
first, the woman was groggy and reluctant to drink, but the deformed mute was insistent, and after about ten minutes, she had finished the entire glass. With fresh fluids in her, Amy picked up noticeably, becoming more lucid. She sat herself upright and checked the bandage herself, peering underneath at her wound.

“We do good?” Tom asked her.

“Not bad,” she whispered with a weak smile at Tom and Sam. “I’ll live.”

She reached down
and rubbed Digby’s head, as he stared up at her from his position by her feet. His tail patted the carpet softly in response.

Though Tom tried to tell her to sit back and relax, Amy then set about tending to Raj. She tried to disregard his terrible confession. He had put his life on the line, on what couldn’t have been more than a hunch, to save them all. Whether or not that was down to pure guilt, it counted for a lot in Amy’s books.

After approximately fifteen minutes of her sitting, doting over him, holding a cold damp cloth against his hot forehead, Raj finally jolted back to life, his eyes wide as he gasped for breath.

“Get him some water,” Amy said.

Tom went to the kitchen and returned with a fresh glass, handing it to the doctor.

“What in God’s name did you do to that thing?” Muz asked from over in his armchair, as he watched the inhuman drink.

“I… I’m not sure,” Raj said, heavily fatigued. “But I don’t want to have to do it again anytime soon.”

“You must have had some idea what you were doing,”
Amy stated, rinsing her cloth in a bowl of water, before wringing it out and reapplying it to Raj’s forehead.

“Well, I theorised that the amoeboid masses weren’t digesting their prey,” Raj told her, shuffling himself up against the backrest of the sofa. “Rather, they were absorbing them via cellular de-formatting. I guessed that, as the cells of my body had already been subjected to this process, I should in essence be immune to its attack
and my own newly evolved cellular abilities might even be able to mount a counter attack, if you will.”

The men regarded him with thoroughly perplexed expressions. Amy, though she frowned, nodded in rudimentary understanding.

“You guessed?” she said. “That was very brave.”

“Man have big balls,” Tom agreed.

Feeling restless, Muz stepped out onto the balcony. Sensing the man’s clear unease, Amy struggled painfully to her feet. She first went to the bedroom to dig out a clean jumper, and then went out after him. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they leant against the rail in silence until Amy felt the need to try to snap Muz out of whatever it was that was eating his mind.

“It’s going to be okay,” she told him softly. The words sounded hollow to her ears. “We’ve got enough food to last us weeks, a month maybe, if we stretch it out. From now on, we don’t leave the block at all. Digby will just have to learn to do his business in one of the other flats.”

Muz shot her a powerful stare, his weary eyes brimming with pain, hate, sorrow, and fear. Without saying a word in reply, he went back inside, headed straight for the bathroom and locked himself in.

He stared at the reflection of his
dirty weathered face in the mirror for some time. Then, lifting up his T-shirt between the bottom of his stab vest and his kit belt, he examined the bite wound to his side. It wasn’t deep and had already stopped bleeding, but he knew what it meant. He leant forward and banged his head against the glass as loudly as he dared, without the others in the adjacent room hearing the noise.

He’d allowed himself to become complacent. After fighting off countless animated corpses without a single one of them so much as managing to scratch him
, he’d become cocky, blasé. That fucking fox had managed a lucky strike and had caught him in the abdomen where his vest wasn’t quite long enough to protect, before he had crushed its skull.

He could think only one thought; he had to get home to his family, or find them wherever they were now. He had to live, for the sake of his wife, their daughter and their unborn child. He could not quit.

Sucking in a deep lungful of air, he turned and opened the door, to find Raj standing just on the other side.

“What?” Muz asked. He didn’t like the knowing look the man was giving him.

Raj walked into the bathroom with Muz and closed the door behind him.

“Let me see,” he said without preamble.

“See what?”

“Please, Constable Dogan, let’s not play games,” Raj told Muz, leaving no room for argument. “After all that has happened, I know a dead man when I see one.”

From the moment he had come round on the sofa, the doctor with his inhuman intellect had seen the mortal fear in the police officer’s eyes.

Muz lifted up his T-shirt and Raj stooped to examine the wound.
He then took one of the copper’s hands in his own and pressed his fingertips, while listening to the beating of the man’s heart.

“How long do I have?” Muz asked meekly.

Raj looked him square in the eyes. He was already beginning to exhibit signs of amoeboid reprogramming in his extremities. His skin was pallid, his heart rate slowing, and capillary refill was poor. There was little Raj could do for him now.

“The rate of assimilation varies, depending on a number of factors,” the doctor told him solemnly. “If you have a
strong healthy immune system, it may delay the process slightly. Your metabolic rate is probably the main issue though, the slower the better in this instance. Being a man in your forties who appears to have lived a fairly sedentary lifestyle should actually go in your favour.”

Raj then bent a
nd picked up a cardboard box from the floor and placed it on the toilet lid. The box contained numerous packets of tablets that had been collected from the other flats in the block. Raj rummaged through the contents and selected a box. Removing one of the blister trays, he popped out several of the tablets and handed them to Muz.

“Antibiotics,” he said, continuing to examine more packets.
“Swallow.”

“Will they stop me
from getting infected?” Muz asked desperately.

“You’re already infected,” Raj told him flatly. “The pills should retard the spread of the foreign cells to some degree though
, and at least buy you a little time.”

“But I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

Having finished with the box, Raj then rifled through the cabinet above the sink and retrieved a small white box containing more pills.

“What are those?” Muz asked, gulping repeatedly, as he tried to force the tiny tablets down his dry throat.

“Sleeping pills,” Raj told him. “Take four for now. They will also help fight the assimilation process.”

“I can’t afford to sleep right now,” Muz told him.

“The main thing is that you try to remain calm and keep your heart rate as low as possible.”

Muz shot the inhuman doctor a hard look. How was it possible for him to stay calm, knowing what he faced?

“An increased heart rate will only push the cellular reformatting through your system faster,” Raj continued to warn him.

Muz downed the sleeping pills.

“Please don’t say anything to the others,” he implored the man. “Not just yet.”