Necropolis Rising (8 page)

“
Attention, oncoming vehicles! You are ordered to pull over immediately! This is your last warning! We are authorized to use
deadly force
! We
will
fire upon you! Repeat, we
will
fire upon you!”

Deadly force. No-one was getting out of the city; that was crystal. In the dark, the parasite threatened to stir but the sudden, staccato sound of a high caliber machine gun rippled through Kunaka’s thoughts, he looked up and watched the Challenger’s co-axial chain gun pumping 4,000 rounds per minute down the street, an incongruous sight, a terrible sight, a signal that the world had suddenly changed.

Through his binoculars, Kunaka observed the Challenger’s target - a large articulated Eddie Stobart truck - come apart, it’s front grill peeling back in a series of bright flashes, its front tires shredding, pulling it sharply to the right and into a row of terraced houses. Through the binoculars, it seemed as though all this were happening elsewhere. The Stobart wagon rolled once, metal and canvas flapping, then ploughed into the houses with a dreadful, distant crash. There was a small explosion as a gas main ruptured, a fiery plume blossoming skywards. The roar of the explosion followed shortly afterwards, dull and final.

“
Stu?” Not Grandpa Joe this time, it was O’Connell’s voice in his ear. “What the hell’s happening?”

Stu told him.

Small arms fire now, peppering the night. Nothing was stopping this exodus, Stu was now certain of this. So, it seemed, were the troops at the barricade.

“
120 mm!” the Corporal yelled. “Put a hole in the road! Slow 'em down, for Christ’s sake!”

He
can see more than the armada slipping away into the night
, Stu thought. He can see his stripes going with them. Desperation’s driving this man and nothing good will come of it.

Smoke from the burning buildings drifted across the road, a thick black mass in the viewfinder. All the time Kunaka tried to fight off the memory of the Kingston storm clouds. Without warning the dense smoke parted. Waved aside by a larger, denser mass. Another wagon, big - though not like the Eddie Stobart truck - but towing a long thick cylinder.

“
Oh, Jesus,” Kunaka breathed and instinct had him slamming the Mastiff into reverse, accelerating with such velocity the truck wavered slightly in the road. He used his mirrors to ensure he didn’t collide with parked cars. He used the windscreen to make sure he was putting enough distance between the Mastiff and the inevitable.

The Corporal screamed for the Challenger to hold its fire, but the muzzle barked, spitting a 120mm armour-piercing shell into the cabin of the oncoming truck.

The oncoming petrol tanker
.

The conflagration was big, the cabin obliterated, the container punctured and igniting 3000 gallons of unleaded petrol that came as a burning, blistering wave, consuming all it touched, causing Kunaka to close his eyes for a second.

Troops ran, flames licking at their clothes, the masks melting to their faces, suffocating them with molten, bubbling rubber and plastic.

The remnants of the truck smashed through the road block, the Challenger 2 cast aside, spinning into a garden where its munitions erupted, tearing the vehicle and crew to pieces in a series of spectacular explosions.

Breathing heavily, Kunaka stared at the devastation in his windshield. It had been some time since he’d seen such carnage. He never thought he would see it here; not on the streets of the UK.

How fragile it all is, this life we have
. It was Grandpa Joe again, and this time Kunaka nodded an accord.

“
Update? Over.” O’Connell said in his ear. “Stu? Are we at war out there, over?”

“
Fuck knows,” Kunaka replied honestly. “But we’re clear to proceed. Repeat: we are clear to proceed. Over and out.”

The Mastiff moved forward. Its 6x6 drive would make easy work of the debris, just so long as he steered clear of the burning puddles in the streets. It was only Kunaka battling his reluctance to go any further that made the next part of the journey slow going.

***

Shipman had barely suggested that Colonel Carpenter take a look at the CCTV screens in the ops room, when muted shouts of alarm came from next door.

There was a rapid knocking on the door to their temporary office, and the young woman from the COM burst in without waiting for authorization to enter.

“
Sir! Sir! You’ve got to see this! It’s a nightmare!!” The woman’s face was ashen; her eyes dull with disgust and disbelief. Carpenter had seen her expression before: in the black and white faces of the jury at the Nuremburg war trials. He watched the full footage at Sandhurst thirty years ago, and the eyes of those judges, the unmitigated horror at man’s inhumanity to man was alive and well in this young woman.

“
Easy, soldier,” Carpenter said, coming to the door, but the woman had turned away to vomit in the hallway; her small frame pumping out more than most would have thought possible.

The other five soldiers in the Operations Room were huddled around the VDU, their faces grim and pale, three of them had the drawn look of people trying to hold onto the contents of their stomach. The other two had dark smears on their tunics.

At the Colonel’s approach the Corporal glanced up, his eyes haunted by the images on the screen.

“
They were dead,” he muttered. “We were sure of it, Sir.” His voice had a lilt to it, as though he were fighting back tears. “But they can’t be.”

Carpenter was watching the screen. Brindley Place again, the bars, the canals; but the buckled bodies were no longer strewn amongst the tables and chairs; no longer sprawled on the tow path.

They were walking
.

Their limbs fixed and twisted, their gait slow and unsure, their faces vacant and dead. Yet they were still walking.

Although Carpenter knew of Whittington’s experiments, had seen the lone figure ambling through Broad Street and colliding with a lamp post, seeing a group of dead-but-not-dead people shambling along was something different. Here he could see the potential; here he could see the
scale
of what could happen if this terror Whittington had released upon the world escaped the cordon.

But the CCTV gave up its final terrible treasure; a shape was amongst them, a figure that moved differently; its limbs flailing, dark splashes arcing into the air.

Someone alive. Someone being
eaten alive!

A face broke free of the shapeless mass, mouth open in a silent scream, man or woman it was hard to tell, one cheek had been ripped off; the bottom lip was gone exposing bloody teeth, one of the un-dead was gnawing off an ear. Then, mercifully, it was gone, lost amid the biting tearing throng.

“
This is what we can expect if the Lazarus Initiative gets loose, Colonel,” Shipman said bluntly. “Those who aren’t eaten alive will become zombies if bitten.”

“
Timescale?” Carpenter asked. There was anger inside him now. Such things were not warfare. Whittington was the harbinger of un-death; a devil in a white coat.

“
Half an hour from bite to rebirth,” Shipman answered.

“
Find that boy,” Carpenter whispered.

“
Finding him is the easy part,” the Major replied. “Whether he’s still alive or not is another matter.”

***

9

The blow to the head has left him dazed, confused; the blood rushes in his ears like a fierce, rampant torrent. It is a visceral, feral sound but it is reassuring. It means that he is alive. He will come to realize it soon enough but for now he listens to it, relishing its pulse; its rhythm.

The darkness grows bored and moves on, becoming a murky grey; the shade of dawn light; the colour of consciousness. Sounds now, no longer internalized, no longer base: the fizz of electricity somewhere nearby; the insistent blanket rustle of the wind buffeting the air, the flapping of papers, the trickle of water. Dawn light relents; he feels pain; it is bright and real and reviving. His head pounds, his ankle throbs.

With the pain comes the feint flicker of awareness and the first conscious thought.

“
What the fuck happened?”

Thom Everett pulled himself upright, his head protesting at the unexpected movement. He winced, his eyes folding shut and bright spots flickering behind his lids.

“
Shit. Shit. Shit!”

His throat was thick with dust and his tirade brought with it a series of hacking coughs that wracked his body and sent fresh bouts of pain through his temples.

He lifted his hands and checked himself over. He could feel the egg-sized lump on his scalp almost immediately; nestling in his blonde, dust peppered hair and sticky with blood. He brought his hand away and wiped the spots of tacky gore on his trousers.

His trousers. Roberto Cavalli, now ruined. A memory - he was going out, meeting a gorgeous Asian girl - was her name Wei Lin? - taking the girl who could be Wei Lin for a linguini and a bottle of Dom Perignon at
Simpsons
; then hopefully back here for some eastern promise, soft sheets and firm body; a perfect night.

There was a time when things were far from perfect. And that time wasn’t so long ago. Six months, in fact.

It seemed longer but good times have a habit of blunting the bad; the times of living in the hell hole that was
Clydesdale Tower
.

Clydesdale, a thirty two storey, 90 metre monstrosity of white paint and dull steel, rising from Birmingham’s Chinese Quarter. A place of notoriety; a place under constant covert surveillance by West Midlands police, where hepatitis carrying junkies taped their used needles under the banisters in the stairways, just for an embittered laugh; or embedded hypodermics in the elevator buttons ready to impale the helping hand of some witless health care professional.

Yet despite this, Thom had been initially grateful for his nineteenth floor flat because no matter how shitty it was, it was Utopia compared to living with his mum and dad.

His mum, Joy, was anything but joyful. She was a quiet woman who occasionally elevated her mood to surly for special occasions. But she looked after him well enough, going through the motions, parenting by numbers. She had her moments, the occasional joke, an evening of high spirits, usually after a few Christmas Sherries; a nod towards the woman she once was, the woman before becoming Mrs. Arthur Everett.

Arthur, Thom’s father was an artist of the vilest kind. He worked on people and created monsters. Arthur Everett was a bullish, ignorant bigot; Birmingham’s finest - and then some - a man who did what the fuck he wanted, when he wanted, and to whom he wanted. He brought out the worst in people with such little effort he was like some kind of poison, his mere presence corrupting humanity from the inside.

When he wasn’t speaking his ugly mind, Arthur Everett was communicating with his fists. Thom’s mum had been the main target in the early days. Thom stepped into her carpet slippers when he was old enough to question some of his father’s vitriol. It started at 10 years of age when Arthur Everett, the last bastion of bigotry began to talk bout “niggers” and “rag heads” and Thom told him that his teacher said that such words were racist and the product of an ignorant mind.

Arthur Everett’s big face turned bright red, his big, beer-fuelled belly baulked with outrage from beneath his
Rule Britannia
tee-shirt. And he knocked 10 year old Thom off his feet with a massive blow to his head, the stars he saw staying with him for a good half hour afterwards.

After this Arthur Everett declared open season on his son. The physical abuse came thick and fast, disinherited but contrived, always open handed, never fists, and, other than the original assault, to the body, where it could not be readily seen.

Joy Everett always tended to her son afterwards, an ambiguous affair beginning with words of comfort and ending with hints that Thom was perhaps antagonizing matters. He hated her for this, it was the reason why he never visited her now; even though Arthur racist, bigot, dip-shit Everett was now maggot fodder in Rowley Regis Cemetery, a coronary saving the world from one less moron

So at eighteen, Thom left his mum to it, and moved into Clydesdale Tower; his own place - his own space, and as time ticked on, his world became smaller; helped by the odd mugging or two, once in the elevator, another time in the stairwell. A mobile phone and a wallet later, Thom was looking elsewhere for new premises. And he was still looking when he found Dr. Richard Whittington.

He was in a bar, bombed on Polish lager when Whittington said that he had a “proposition” for him.

“
I bet you have,” Thom said through a fog of booze. “Move on, guy. I’m not that kind of fella.”

“
Nor am I, my good man,” Whittington had said, his small eyes intense behind his even smaller spectacles. “This is a business deal. Nothing sordid, but it has to be between us.”

“
What do I get out of it?” Thom had asked.

“
Can I buy you a drink and explain the details?”