Cobra Z (15 page)

“Woah, check this out.” Jack found himself pulled out of his dream world by one of his fellow workers. She was holding up her smartphone, which displayed Facebook, and a smile was adorning her Goth visage.

“Chris, you know you shouldn’t be on your phone. If Clive catches you, he’ll do his nut.”

“Chill dude,” Chris said. “What Clive doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and he won’t be back for an hour yet. But check it out, there’s a riot in Canary Wharf.” She showed him the various Facebook threads, some displaying pictures, others video.

“Good,” said Jack. “It’s about time those rich fuckers realised how the other 99% live.” Jack didn’t actually believe that, but he felt it was the response the people around him would want to hear. Although Clive had left him “in charge”, he knew he wasn’t. The people he worked with would do the bare minimum to keep their jobs even when Clive was around. They weren’t going to show respect for some eighteen year old who started trying to throw his weight around. So Jack did the wise thing and didn’t even try.

“True dat,” Chris said with a grin, and she wondered off to join her fellow employees in the kitchens.

9.41AM, 16
th
September 2015, University College Hospital Accident and Emergency, Euston Rd, London

“We’ve got more coming in,” the face said as it popped into the door of her office. The face didn’t stay long enough for her to give a response, and Dr. Simone Holden realised she was in for another busy morning. She let out a sigh, massaging the bridge of her nose, hoping that the two Aspirin would hurry up and kick in. She had drunk too much last night, and although she wasn’t suffering a full-blown hangover, she was still definitely suffering from an alcohol-induced headache. Holden knew she was drinking too much, and even felt the urge coming on her during the day sometimes. So far she had resisted that, but the lure of the wine bottle seemed too powerful when the end of her shift came. There had even been a few mornings when she had thought about rehydrating herself by the use of a saline drip. Things hadn’t quite come to that yet, fortunately.

As one of the A&E consultants, she not only had to help run the department but also deal with the cases as and when they came in. Ten years she had been doing this – ten years of heart attacks, strokes, poisonings and even the occasional gunshot victim. The stress of the job was definitely having a toll on her health, and she knew at some point she would have to consider her career choice. She wasn’t cut out for this anymore. For fucks sake, things were supposed to get easier when she became a consultant. But they didn’t; if anything, the stress increased. And today looked like it would be even worse, the hospital was already running out of beds due to the rioting.

She got up from her chair and left her, quite frankly inadequate, office. Closing and locking the door behind her, she made her way towards the main treatment area. It wasn’t right that she had to lock her door, but the problem with hospitals was they attracted all manner of lowlife as well as the normal decent human beings that she wished were the norm in her department. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, and much of her time was spent dealing with drug users and those intent on killing themselves either through suicide, alcohol or stupidity. The fact that she kept seeing the same faces on a regular basis had reinforced her opinion that alcoholism was just a drawn out form of suicide.

The hospital sounded busy, and she heard running feet behind her, but didn’t turn. Two security guards moved past her, one brushing her arm roughly. She thought she heard a faint “sorry” uttered, and the guards both ran around the corner ahead. She followed them and saw (as well as heard) that there was a commotion in one of the treatment cubicles. The guards had obviously been summoned there by panic alarms, and they both ran into the cubicle.

“Now what?” Holden said under her breath. It was too early for this kind of shit – it really was, even for London. She walked two more steps only to stop dead when one of the guards was flung back out into the corridor, hitting a cart of medical equipment, which spilled noisily to the ground. He collapsed to the floor and lay there apparently stunned. More bodies appeared around her drawn by the noise and the impending drama, but Holden’s attention was pulled to a cubicle to her right where a nurse was trying to hold down a young girl who was thrashing about on the bed, vomit spraying everywhere. Who Holden assumed to be the child’s mother was in hysterics.

“
Feeeeed
,” a voice roared, and the second security guard staggered back out into the corridor, a hand up to his head. He was bleeding, and a nurse ran from the cubicle, obviously distressed and in tears. Holden saw a blood-stained hand grab the cubicle curtain, and the curtain was pulled from its runners onto the floor as a man in police uniform staggered out in front of Holden. That was probably what surprised her the most, not the bloodshot eyes and the face of madness, but the fact the man was a police officer. The first security guard had already picked himself up and was backing away, hands up defensively.

“I don’t want any trouble, mate,” the guard said. Holden felt herself taking the same action, putting distance between her and the officer, but slowly so as hopefully not to attract his attention. He didn’t see her, his concentration briefly on the guard. The policeman hissed violently, and then took off in the same direction as the nurse who had just fled.

There was a scream from her right, and Holden looked to see the nurse with the previously convulsing child clinging to her. The girl was clawing at the nurse’s face. Then Holden saw the blood and witnessed the nurse try and fling the child off her with frantic hands. But the child dug its fingers into her hair and bit down hard onto her face, just under the left eye. The whole accident and emergency department just seemed to erupt around her, and for probably only the second time in her life, Dr. Simone Holden panicked. The first had been when she had witnessed the death of her mother through cancer at the age of nine. The woman who could intubate a fitting child, who could re-inflate a lung, who could suture a spurting femoral artery, felt her sanity slip. As the world around her descended into anarchy, she did the only thing her brain allowed. She ran.

Others ran also. Some fled, some chased, and the wails of a fearful and endangered humanity began to fill the hospital. And as the minutes ticked by, the predators grew in number, infected by bites and scratches and bodily fluids that were more infectious than Ebola. Their ranks swelled, finding easy pickings amongst the hallowed halls of medical science. Doctors, nurses, patients and other hospital staff all were worthy targets of the infection. Holden, close to exhaustion, staggered on, the disease strangely ignoring her. Several infected passed her by chasing other prey, and soon she found herself wandering the hospital almost in a daze, her body shaking as the initial adrenaline of her panic began to wear off.

With no real plan for where she was going, she moved at random and eventually she found herself in the reception area of a part of the hospital distant to where she normally worked. It was deserted, or so she thought, and with sanity beginning to take hold of her again, she went to the nurse’s station to try and find a phone. Get control, she had to get control. Walking around the desk so she was behind the nurse’s station, she picked up the first one she saw and dialled 999, but the loud crash made her drop it, and she spun round to see what had made the noise. Out of sight, she heard what sounded like shuffling feet, and the panic began to build again. Looking around, she noticed an alcove under the main reception desk, and she threw herself there as quietly as she could. Hidden by the bulk of the nurse’s station, she at first couldn’t see, but she could hear.

Shifting her position slightly, Holden noticed light coming through a thin seam at the back of the alcove, and putting her eye to it allowed her to see the reception she had been standing in seconds before. To her horror, she saw the source of the crash. A dead reanimated obese woman turned the corner into the maternity ward reception. She was naked save for a pair of soiled knickers and an assortment of tortuous medical devices. Her chest displayed a gaping wound, held open by rib retractors where the doctors had been previously trying to repair her damaged heart. A bite mark was obvious on her right breast, and a long piece of intubation tubing dangled from her mouth. The woman had obviously been attacked whilst on the operating table, and she moved with drunken randomness. Of course, Holden didn’t know the woman was dead, and her medical mind struggled with what she was looking at. How could what she was looking at be possible?

The zombie’s head spun sharply to the left, the intubation tube whipping like some deformed elephant’s trunk, and the zombie’s body lurched in the same direction. Lacking coordination, it fell, sprawling across the now blood-stained floor and writhed about for several seconds as if trying to swim across the linoleum, its torso propped off the floor by the once sterile rib retractor. Holden watched in awe and disgust as the body started to crawl away from her, attracted by some unknown delight. It scrambled to its feet, the right hand catching on the tube, yanking it from the zombie’s windpipe, bringing forth a gush of foul air and bile. Now standing, the zombie meandered unsteadily off around another corner. And then Holden saw the sign on the wall with the arrow pointing to the way the zombie was heading, and her stomach lurched into her mouth and terror seized her very soul. Maternity Ward. Oh God no.

9.42AM, 16
th
September 2015, St Pancras train station, London

The road outside was awash with blue lights and the sounds of slaughter. PC Fred Aycoth joined the line of riot police that had formed outside the British Library. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on, and his head ached from where something had hit him in the temple.

He had seen his partner of the day have his throat ripped out, had seen a crowd of around thirty charge at the two armed officers he was with. They had issued warnings, but still the crowd ran, blood-stained, with hell in their eyes. Then the shot rang out. Then another, and still the crowd came. Two semi-automatic machine guns against a crowd of thirty was a close run thing, but the machine guns had won out. But preoccupied, they hadn’t seen the others coming out of the station, not until it was too late. Aycoth had seen them, and he had fled, abandoning his fellow officers because he knew it was the only thing he could do. And looking back, he had seen the bullet-felled bodies slowly rise up and continue with the carnage. Although they moved slower and less coordinated, move they did despite their bodies being riddled with bullet holes. Now he stood, part of the thin blue line, cleared by the paramedic who was needed for more serious injuries. Just as he left Aycoth to be scrutinised by an inspector, the paramedic mentioned he had never before seen so many bite injuries. He was having to deal with dozens of them. The inspector had arrived minutes before and was trying to ascertain what the hell was going on.

“Surely you’re mistaken, Constable,” the inspector said.

“I saw my partner have his throat ripped out by someone using his fucking teeth. And I saw them, sir. I saw them get up after our boys had emptied whole clips into them. They just kept coming, even after the warnings, even after the shots ripped into them.” A fellow PC was stood to the side listening, face blanched, holding a bandaged hand from where she had been bitten.

“You can’t be seriously telling me they were zombies, because that’s what you are describing. They must have had some sort of body armour. That’s the only logical explanation.” Aycoth grabbed him and almost dragged him to the police riot line, the inspector surprised by the ferocity and the fear in his subordinate’s face. Aycoth pointed at the massing throng of infected some thirty metres away.

“Then why are there people in police uniform getting ready to attack us?”

St. Pancras International Railway Station was the main station for trains to the Northeast of the country, and also the primary UK hub for the Eurostar train, bringing passengers through the Channel Tunnel from mainland Europe. Its layout was a lower level of shops and restaurants, with an upper-mezzanine style level that held more bars and restaurants. Deep within its bowels, the news of the battle outside had shot through the thousands of commuters. It was too late to seal off the station, not that it could be sealed off because there were already infected within it. Wounded and scared, they had fled to what they thought was relative safety, thinking this was only a riot. But it wasn’t a riot, and they brought the infection with them. Shutting the fire doors on the lower level slowed the advance, but more infected just got in through the upper entrance with its direct street access, and through the attached hotel. As people ran, the howls came from the upper level as infected hurled themselves down upon the compressed and panicked collection of humanity in the stations shopping concourse. Other infected vomited down upon the masses, infecting hundreds without the need for teeth.

It was a slaughter.

Ryan had experienced the closest thing to hell he thought he could possibly imagine. The urgency to use the bathroom hit him quickly just as he passed through the barriers to the St. Pancras underground station, and he half-ran, half-walked to where he knew the gent’s toilet was in the main train station. Concentrating on keeping his sphincter closed, he tried to ignore the stabbing pains in his abdomen that threatened to send him double. The pressure built up to intolerable levels just as he seated his scrawny arse down on the porcelain throne and let loose a torrent of vile smelling waste, obviously a result of something dodgy he had eaten the night before. God that was truly unpleasant, and he whimpered as another purge made its way to the watery depths below.