Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (22 page)

“
Did you just see that?” Carl gasped.

“What?” Muz asked, still refusing to look at what the other man was referring to.

“That mess on the floor just looked at me.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Muz told him. “She’s clearly dead.”

“I’m serious,” Carl protested. “She’s still alive.”

“Undead,” Chuck
clarified.

Chapter 6

Amy
& Mark

Muz was not at all happy with Chuck, a civilian, walking around with that handgun in his jacket. But this was a far different world to the one he had been living in two days ago. The laws, which he had always worked to uphold, seemed irrelevant now, potentially even hindering their chances of survival, so he grudgingly let the matter pass. Besides, Chuck was a much larger man than himself and at least five stone heavier. Getting into a fight with the man over the weapon would not be the best idea he had ever had.

Making a break for it from the police station at a run, they headed left along Grahame Park Way, continuously scanning all around them for other people in the area. Thankfully, at this point in time, the stretch of the road they could see was devoid of people.

“Before we head for the tube, we should try the police driving school over at the Peel Centre,” Muz suggested to the other two men. “There should be a whole fleet of cars there and it’s only across the road.”

“A car would be better than walking up the train line,” Carl agreed, as the three of them scurried along, instinctively bending over as they ran, so as to keep low and reduce the chance
s of them being seen.

“I suppose it’s worth a try,” Chuck puffed.

They paused by the junction with Heritage Avenue, pressing themselves against the railings on the corner. Peering into the short road, it was only when they felt sufficiently satisfied that there were no immediate threats ahead that they broke into a run again.

The short road that cut through the new-build area of Beaufort Park sported a modest parade of shops on the right, among which
, was a Tesco mini-market, which made up the ground floor of one of the otherwise residential blocks. Scuttling past the store, they saw that the windows and the glass panels in the sliding doors had been smashed. Inside, the premises had been ransacked and there now remained very little on the shelves after the looting. It seemed that Jenna had not been the only one to have that idea, Muz thought.

The thought of the poor woman brought images of her sickening death back to the forefront of his mind and he had to force himself to concentrate on what was happening right here, right now. He could
n’t afford the luxury of allowing himself to dwell in misery; he had to remain alert.

Looking up a
t the blocks all around them now, Carl saw a face looking down at them from one of the upper windows. As soon as their observer realised they had been spotted, they retreated back from the window, out of view.

“There’s someone up there, in that flat,” Carl informed Muz and Chuck.

“Yeah, and?” Chuck responded.

“Shouldn’t we go up there and get them to come with us
, officer?” Carl asked.

“I’m sure there’s lots of survivors caught up in this and if they want to stay put in their flats, that’s their choice. It may even be the smarter choice,” Chuck told him.

Seconds later, they heard a chilling mortal scream from another of the flats somewhere above them.

“Or maybe not,” Muz added solemnly.

After a short sprint, the road ended at the junction with Aerodrome Road, a lengthy straight stretch on which was situated the Metropolitan Police Training School, known as the Peel Centre.

“If we head down to the right,” Muz said, as they again paused, looking round the wall to assess the new road, “the driving school entrance is about a hundred metres along.”

“Okay,” Chuck replied, and was the first of them to break cover, running in the direction Muz had advised, despite him being clearly the most heavily out of breath.

Muz and Carl were quickly on his heels and followed the lump of a man along the deserted road. They soon saw the entrance that Muz had spoken of and felt unnerve
d by its proximity to a large roundabout junction. With a total of four roads converging, they could find themselves under attack with little or no warning from one or more directions at once. They would have to get through the gate as rapidly as possible.

A dip in the road leant a little speed to Chuck’s flagging gait
, as the other two men caught up with him.

“Get your card out,” he urged Muz.

“There’s no swipe card access,” Muz told him, panting almost as much as the fat man. “The gates are normally manned by guards.”

“So how the hell do we get inside?” Chuck asked with justified concern.

“Dunno,” Muz panted back, suddenly aware he hadn’t actually thought it through.

“What?”

“I guess we’re going to have to climb the gate,” the copper told him.

Chuck eyed the obstacle they were heading for. The perimeter of the site was fairly secure
, in that the high walls and metal fences were topped with coils of barbed wire. The closed gate was a weak point though, lacking barbed wire itself, as Muz had clearly assessed. It was however still a formidable eight feet high and didn’t even have any horizontal bars on which to step.

“No. No way,” Chuck stated adamantly. “I’m done climbing.”

“Are you sure about that?” Carl asked, pointing over at the roundabout, as they almost reached the barrier to the training school.

On
the circle of road, by the exit for Colindale Avenue, the direction in which the tube lay, there sat an abandoned red Y-reg’ Nissan Micra. The car was rocking on its suspension and though it was not possible to see through its blood smeared windows, the sounds of shuffling and thumping could be heard from within.

Needing no further warning of what danger might be inside the car, Carl, without so much as even breaking his stride, launched his crowbar over the high gate, mounted the horizontal red and white striped vehicle barrier with one foot
, and threw himself upwards to hook his elbows over the top of the gate and pull himself up.

As the iron bar he slung hit the tarmac on the other side with a loud clang, a head responded to the sound by thrusting itself up through the
sunroof of the little car. It was the head of what appeared to Muz and Chuck to be a twelve-year-old school girl. Her face was bloodied and in her teeth, she held what could only be a human liver.

Seeing the two men, she snarled viciously and pulled hersel
f up through the roof of the Micra. As the girl dragged her carcass down the windscreen and bonnet, the men saw she was in a horrifically bad state. Both her legs were completely missing and all that remained of her pelvis was an empty bowl of bone, picked almost clean of all meat and the intestines it normally held.

The animated remains of the schoo
l girl hit the ground and started to drag themselves over to Muz and Chuck, her bare pelvis clattering uselessly behind her at the end of her protruding spine. Though her green and blue tie still hung from around her neck, her once white shirt had lost all of its buttons, and her prepubescent chest was one huge grit-filled friction burn. The tips of all her fingers were worn down, exposing the bones of the digits, all of which showed she had been dragging herself around in this manner for some time.

“I think I can handle her,” Chuck declared, contemplating stamping on her head and crushing her skull under the heavy boots he was wearing, which had been an odd accompaniment to his suit and were just as
ill matched to the custody clothes he now wore.

Just as he said this, two more heads appeared through th
e sunroof of the car. These belonged to two men. One was white, but the other’s ethnicity could not easily be determined, as his head was little more than a skull, lacking any hair and the majority of his skin and facial muscles. One swollen and discoloured ear lolled precariously from the sole patch of flesh still covering the side of his face. There was a prominent crack in the top of his scalped cranium, running from his crown all the way to his right eye socket, with a single incisor wedged within, the root of the tooth jutting out like a little horn. It seemed that someone had tried to bite through his skull to get at the juicy brain within, but had instead, ended up minus one tooth.

Responding to the presence of new prey, the two men in the car fought wildly with each other in their eagerness to be the first to clamber
through the sunroof. Clawing and pushing against each other, they tumbled out and landed together with a single heavy thump on the road.

Skull-head got to his feet and standing erect, ran for the gated entrance and the two men that stood there. The other, a man of athletic build and little more than a teenager, was one of the many whose buttock flesh had been torn from their skeletons and could therefore no longer stand. Raking at the surface of the road with his hands and feet, he rapidly overtook the other man and the girl, sprinting like a dog towards his next kill.

There was no point turning and running the opposite way down the long stretching road behind them, Muz and Chuck rapidly determined. The young girl was little threat, but the two men, especially the quadruped, would easily catch them. With no other choice available, they ran towards their onrushing attackers, closing the remaining distance between themselves and the gate. Emulating the more capable Carl as best they could, they hastily climbed onto the cylindrical arm of the vehicle barrier, feeling it bow under their combined weight. With the metal pipe wobbling precariously under their feet, they leapt for the top of the gate, just as the disabled sprinter reached them.

Both men pulled themselves up
and over in the nick of time to avoid the fastest of their attackers from grabbing them, as in a desperate effort to reach them, his run turned into a surprisingly powerful leap and his face smashed hard into the upright metal bars of the gate.

“Nice one,” Carl praised the men, relieved to see them safely within the training sight with him.

“You total prick,” Chuck shouted so forcefully that flecks of spittle flew from his pronounced lips. “If you put me in danger like that again, I will snap you in two and leave you to be eaten.”

“Calm down,” Carl resp
onded, his fear of the bulky man clearly written across his face. “You made it, didn’t you?”

“We might have made it in here
, but we’ve still got to face them on the way back out,” Muz pointed out.

Leaving the three insane and mutilated people reaching through t
he gaps in the gate, while gnawing and scratching at the bars, they walked through the site. Passing the petrol pumps and the car wash, all of which could have easily belonged in any fuelling station, Muz headed for the driving school’s fleet depot. Looking over to his right, past the skid pan, he saw the running track and the school’s expansive sports field. The acres of grass were currently covered with olive-green tents that looked military in origin, their door flaps fluttering in the breeze. There was not a person to be seen and pieces of paper, plastic bags, and other debris, wandered between the tents at the whim of the modest wind.

Muz remembered
it being announced that the initial RVP had been comprised and therefore relocated to the training school grounds. It was evident however that the inexorable spread of the epidemic had since forced this base of operations to be evacuated, just as the police station had, and be relocated elsewhere.

Looking out further
beyond the rows of abandoned tents, he could see the tube line that ran along the western perimeter of the grounds. There was no way to get onto the tracks from here though, due to the fifteen-foot high fencing. They would have to brave the streets and probably face being attacked yet again, in order to somehow reach the station.

Entering a large two-storey buil
ding through a drive-in doorway, they found themselves in what was clearly a covered car park. Though between the pillars that supported the upper floor there were numerous parking bays laid out in rectangles of white paint, there was not a single car to be seen. Amid the empty air of the building, the sounds of their footfalls bounced off the surrounding walls and echoed around the garage.

“Damn it,” Muz cursed aloud.

He couldn’t believe his bad luck. It made sense that when the grounds had been evacuated they would have taken every serviceable car with them, just as they had over at the police station, but he had been hoping to find something, despite such logic.

The only vehicle that remained in the whole expanse of the garage was something affectionately referred to a
s Jumbo One. It was a massive yellow and white JCB digger with a great toothed shovel on the end of a hydraulic arm. There was no wonder this was the sole vehicle that had been left behind. It had a one-man flimsy cab that offered little protection from attack and had to have a top speed of about ten miles per hour. As Muz had seen, the crazies could run almost twice that speed.

The dejection he felt clearly showing in his hunched gate, Muz walked over to the garage hand’s office, to see what he might find there. As he stepped through the doorway into the tiny cubicle, he nearl
y choked on his own welling vomit and staggered back out.

“What’s wrong?” Carl asked, seeing the officer pressing a fist to his lips and repeatedly swallowing.

“It looks like they managed to get in here too,” Muz managed to say.

Carl and Chuck both walked over to where Muz was stood and looked into the office.
On the floor, almost hidden behind the desk and partially obscured by a computer terminal, keyboard, and other items he had pulled down from the desktop in an effort to get up, there was what should have been by all rights another corpse. Just like everyone else however, the cadaver hadn’t had the dignity to give up the ghost completely, and what remained of him twitched and lurched feebly.