Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (24 page)

Directly out
side the entrance to the station, there was an inordinately dense build-up of vehicles, including an ambulance laying on its side on the pavement. From the sheer number of cars, it seemed evident to Muz that in their panic, people had headed here in throngs. Maybe the nearby arterial road had become jammed to a standstill, and people had thought the tube their only hope of escape. By the look of the sheer number of bodies scattered around, almost all of which had been picked clean, most had not made it to safety. It was a grim sight that only served to feed the fears of the three men scanning the devastation and made them pessimistic about their own chances of survival.

“End
of the road,” Muz announced reluctantly, as Chuck was already clambering down from the side of the digger.

Carl was not so eager to alight and give up his position of safety
, but after a protracted visual inspection of the immediate area, he conceded to climb down from the cab’s roof.

Standing next to the buckled bodywork of the ambulance, the men stared into the open entrance to the station, while trying to conceal their nervousness from each other.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, officer?” Carl asked.

Muz shrugged.

“It’s the most secure route available to us,” Chuck responded adamantly.

Just
then, there was a sudden thump against the roof of the ambulance, coming from within the stricken emergency vehicle. It wasn’t a loud sound, but the close proximity of it caused all three men to jump and back away. There were no subsequent sounds to be heard from inside the ambulance. In fact, the whole street seemed to be wrapped in a silence only the dead should know.

Chuck began to head into the foyer of the station
, but Carl called after him.

“What if there’s someone trapped in there?”

“Then they’re probably as mental as everyone else,” Chuck declared.

“We’re not,”
Muz pointed out. He wanted to walk away from the potential danger as much as Chuck did, but his memory of that other ambulance, of the horrors the pregnant woman had inflicted upon herself, filled him with guilt.

“Open it up then,” he said to Carl.

When the man simply stared at him wide eyed in return, he marched past him, snatching the crowbar out of his grip as he did so. The heavy lever was a far more formidable weapon than his feeble baton. With the bar held ready to be swung, he flung open the rear door of the ambulance and took a step back. As the edge of the horizontal door hit the paving slabs, Muz was already squinting to peer into the back of the ambulance.

It was a mess in there.
When the vehicle had slammed over on its side, everything within, the innumerable items of medical equipment stored in little drawers and cupboards, had become dislodged and were now piled on one wall, which currently acted as the floor. Muz looked past the gurney leaning diagonally across the interior, and saw in a far corner the figure of a person curled tightly in a ball. Though they had tried to conceal themselves under a blanket, Muz could still make out the green material of their trouser legs and shirt. The crowbar wobbled wildly in his shaking hands as he called out.

“Hey.”

There was no response; the person within didn’t so much as twitch.

“Hey
. I can see you,” Muz tried again.

Still the figure didn’t move.

“Are you going to waste the whole day?” Chuck asked moodily.

Muz was just about to give up and walk away
, when he saw a hand emerge from the top of the sheet and pull it down a little to reveal the terrified face of a young woman. From the fear and vulnerability in her eyes, Muz was immediately aware that she was no threat. She had not succumbed to whatever it was that had driven everyone else insane.

“Come on,” Muz beckoned her, extending a hand out to the female paramedic.

She didn’t move and simply stared back at Muz with wide, doe-like eyes.

“Come on,” Muz repeated, climbing awkwardly in through the horizontal door and over the gurney to reach the woman.

She tried to curl tighter into the corner where she was huddled in response to his advance, and when he took hold of one of her arms, she squirmed and wined.

“Stop it,” Muz told her firmly. “You need to get out of here. You need to come with us.”

Eventually, the paramedic stopped resisting Muz’s grip and she went limp.

“It’s not safe,” she mumbled pathetically.

“I know,” Muz replied. “That’s why you need to come with us.”

“It’
s not safe out there.”

“No. No, it’s not
. But they’ll find you in here eventually,” Muz told the woman, locking eyes firmly with her. “What’s your name?”

“Amy.”

“I’m Muz and I’m going to get you out of here. Come on, Amy.”

After a moment of scrutinising Muz,
the worst of the fear faded from her eyes and Amy conceded, shrugging off the blanket. Muz was shocked to see she had been clutching a scalpel the whole time, the delicate knuckles of her tiny hands white around the handle. Her grip loosened a little now, but she did not relinquish the knife, as the two emerged from the overturned ambulance.

“Great,” Chuck sighed to himself on seeing the woman.

“Hi, I’m Carl,” Carl said. “You okay?”

Amy shook her head like a frightened little girl and tears welled in her eyes. Her head darted repeatedly from side to side, as she fearfully looked out for any potential attackers.

“How long have you been hiding in there?” Muz asked her, but she didn’t respond, too preoccupied as she was with observing her surroundings.

Though she was no more than five feet three and petite in frame, she was carrying more than a
couple of stone of unnecessary weight, which her uniform did nothing to hide. Her large, beautifully brown eyes only added to her image of vulnerability, and her face oddly looked all the more pretty for her plump hamster cheeks. All this was framed by collar-length curls of auburn hair.

“Are you coming or not?” Chuck asked testily, turning and heading into the underground station.

“We’re going to follow the tube line north out of here,” Muz explained to Amy. “We’ll be fenced in on both sides, so it should be quite safe.”

Amy scuttled forward, placing herself between Chuck and the other two men, not wanting to be at the rear of their group. As the four entered the station, not one of them noticed
the haggard looking man, crouching and hidden between the jammed cars.

His face and the front of his torn shirt were filthy with blood, both dry and fresh. Unblinking, his cruel eyes regarded the survivors,
uncertain intent written in the lines of his greying skin. He had followed the JCB along Colindale Avenue, and unlike the rest of those afflicted, had managed to remain unseen. Only when the people he was watching moved forward into the building, out of sight, did he break his cover and creep after them.

Carl noticed
that the metal security shutter covering the front of the small convenience shop just inside the station entrance, had been forced open by looters. Asking the others to wait a minute, he crawled in through the levered back corner of the metal slats. He was gone only a moment before scrambling back out with an arm full of flapjacks. Looking pleased with himself, he offered them out to anyone that wanted one.

“Banana flavour?” Chuck said with disgust.

“I’ve got carob coated ones as well,” Carl replied.

“I’ll stick with the banana,” Chuck decided.

They made their way through the open barriers and down the stairs to the platform below. To their great relief, it appeared devoid of any other people. However, Muz and Chuck were not convinced, and set about searching the platform thoroughly, checking behind the base of the stairs and the pillars that supported the road bridge they had driven over.

Amy, snapping out of her introspection and trying to develop some composure, warned the men not to touch the copious amounts of blood that they found splashed and sprayed in abundance around the walls and floor.

As Muz almost reached the northern end of the platform and passed a small building, a waiting room for commuters wanting to escape the elements, he called out to the others.

“We’ve got a live one.”

The two other men came running over, Carl brandishing his bar and Chuck half drawing his gun from his jacket’s inner pocket. Amy hung back a little, not wanting to get too close to any danger. They found Muz standing over a man slumped against the wall of the building.

He was wearing a London Underground uniform
, and the plastic name badge on his chest read, ‘Derek, Station Manager.’ Directly beside him, there lay the corpse of a woman whom he had stripped of all edible tissue. The man snarled at his observers and thrashed his limbs in an effort to get up and attack them, but he was unable to coordinate his motor functions well enough to perform even such a simple task. He was particularly drawn to Amy, desperately reaching out for her, possibly because her being the smallest of the group, he saw her as the easiest victim.

He had suffered a terrible head wound that had cracked a sizeable hole in his cranium. The undulating wet grey tissue of his brain could clearly be seen. The blunt trauma had caused the optic nerve of his left eye to rupture
, and the once black pupil was now red with the blood that had leaked into the glycerine orb.

During the course of the previous night, while he had been slumped motionless against the wall, a spider had crawled up his face and entered his brain cavity through the hole in his skull. It had chosen to nest there, laying its eggs amid the soft moist folds
of his brain that would provide ample food for the hatching brood. Derek was fully aware of the presence in his head, and he could feel the spider’s spindly legs itching, as the arachnid scuttled around inside him.

Amy chose not to
look at this new horror. The men however, were becoming hardened to the hellish sight of the disfigured and maimed. They were therefore able to talk calmly and without apparent emotion, as they stood watching the man.

“Why isn’t he getting up like the others?” Muz asked.

“Brain damage,” Chuck replied.

“That’s worth bearing in mind,” Muz mused.
“So, do we put him out of his misery?”

“I’m not wasting a bullet on him,” Chuck said without a second’s hesitation
, and looked over at Carl and his crowbar.

“I don’t think we can put him out of his misery,” Carl said in response.

“What? Why not?” Muz asked.

“You remember that mess we saw outside the police station when we left?”
Carl reminded the copper.

Muz remembered all too well and looked away guiltily.

“Her head was shattered, literally in pieces, but she was still alive,” Carl pointed out.

“Okay,” Muz said, not wanting the image in his mind.

“I mean her brains were all over the place and her eye still moved to look at us.”

“I said okay. I get it.”

“And that police officer back in your driving school, he was the same,” Carl went on.

“So, there’s nothing we can do then. Let’s get out of here,” Chuck said with finality and walked to the end of the platform.

The others followed him again and the platform’s tip ended between two sets of tracks that ran either side of it.

“Just be careful stepping over the lines. They may well still be live,” Muz said
, as they stepped over to the left of the tracks. He couldn’t hear the power line humming, but that wasn’t enough confirmation that the power had been turned off for him to risk stepping on it.

A dishevelled band, together the man in the blue uniform, the woman in the green, and the two men oddly attired in custody clothing
, trudged noisily north on the loose gravel. The wet slate-grey sky hung oppressively over them, as heavy as their moods.

The man who had observed them enter the station now continued to watch, still unseen, as he stood on the platform beside the broken station manager.
The man was Doctor Raj Shah, the first afflicted, the man whose experiments had caused all of this.

Constantly driven to wander by the insatiable need to find meat, in order to fight his raging necrosis, he had drifted all the way to Colindale from Mill Hill East. Initially
, he had been drawn to the screams on the nearby A41 from people trapped in the pile up, unable to escape their cars, sitting ducks for the afflicted that had gathered in force to feed on them. The numerous victims had served to stuff his gut again and again, but all too soon, the savage feast was at an end, the pain of his starvation had pushed him on. From the A-road, he had staggered along Aerodrome Road, where he had happened across the three men on the JCB.

On seeing these survivors, he had been confused by his conflicting and fragmented thoughts. The sight of them, especially the fat one with the darkest meat, had brought to a
head his burning hunger and a desire to tear into them, so strong that it actually caused him to shake. And yet, unlike the rest of those suffering his terrible condition, he had managed to refrain from instantly attacking them. He was held in check by his fascination of the men. As a result of the copious amounts of proteins he had ingested on the A41, he had regained a little of his former awareness, and the sight of the three men, the way they moved and operated the vehicle, reminded him of how he too, had all too recently managed to function in such a well-controlled manner. The men intrigued him, and though he was no more than a ghost of his former self, the scientist in him that was an integral element of his psyche, urged him to study them.