Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (30 page)

“You never try and control a situation you don’t fully unders
tand,” Chuck replied. “If they’ve managed to successfully contain this, they can afford to do the rest in slow time, gathering intelligence, so they know what they’re up against.”

Having swiftly dispelled any hope Carl had still held that they might soon be rescued, the black man strode off.

“We need to head up the hill to the left there,” Muz said for the benefit of Carl and Amy, as they followed the heavy lump of a man who had taken it upon himself to take the lead. “The train station is just the other side of the bridge.”

The only other person they saw was one of the affected slumped against the last shop of Silkstream Parade before the bridge. Propped up against the door of the
barbers, was the boy Muz recognised as having fought off with a traffic cone. His head was lolling unnaturally backwards on his neck, one eye staring blankly up at the slate-grey sky. The other eye he had apparently lost in a fight, along with the flesh of half of his face, since Muz’s encounter with him. The gelatine orb, was no doubt, currently in the process of being digested in someone’s stomach.

The poor boy was sodden, clearly having been sat where he was all night, unmoving despite the rain. Without the stimulus of passing prey to
stir him into a killing frenzy, he had slipped into an energy-saving apathetic trance-like state.

Now, as the little band of survivors approached, he stirred into an approximation of life. His head pulled forward and
the water that had gathered in his open mouth and empty eye socket spilled out.

The dog at Amy’s side growled and whined, causing Chuck to look back and edge away.

“You’re not really thinking of bringing that thing along, are you?” he asked her.

“Yes, why not?” the woman replied, placing a protective hand on the animal’s head.

“Because I hate dogs.”

Amy shrugged and gave the big man sickly sweet smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”

At that very moment, a piercing mortal scream could be heard from somewhere nearby, just over the bridge. Stopping in their tracks, the group struggled to see over the brow of the road and past the abandoned cars, but they could make out no signs of movement ahead of them. Though they waited, there came no further sounds.

The boy snarled, the ripped skin of his right cheek flapping with expelled air from his lungs, and began to clamber to his feet. It was a slow and ungainly effort, his joints and muscles still frozen with the chill of the night.

Without waiting for the imminent attack to come, Chuck marched over to the youngster and beat him mercilessly round the head with his heavy metal candlestick. After several rapid sickening cracks to his skull, the child keeled over, twitching but unable to get back up.

“First kill of the day,” Chuck announced in a desperate effort to ignore his own feelings of revulsion at what he had just done.

“Technically, you haven’t killed him though,” Carl pointed out. “He’s still moving.”

“From the terrible injuries I’ve seen these poor bastards suffer, I think the only real way to kill them would be to burn them,” Muz declared. He had been giving the matter some thought. “Cook them all the way through, until there’s nothing left but bones and ash.”

“He was just a boy,” Amy whined, looking with pity at the spasming child. The dog was edging forward to sniff at the broken boy but she took hold of his collar and pulled him back.

“And he would have eaten you just like the others,” Chuck defended himself.

“He’s right,” Muz said. “We can’t let emotions take control. These people seem to be as good as dead already.”

“They are dead,” Chuck muttered.

Nervously, they walked over the bridge, eyeing the road ahead for the source of that shrill scream. Muz jumped up against the wall of the bridge and held on long enough to get a look at the platform and the tracks below.

“Looks clear down there,” he said, to the relief of the others.

The dog began to growl again, alerting the others to the presence of someone up ahead, even before they reached the far side of the bridge and the area directly in front of the entrance to Burnt Oak tube station was revealed to them. There, on the wide stretch of pavement, by the phone boxes and a magazine stand, they saw two women.

One of the women, no more than
twenty-five years old, lay prone on the ground. With a large kitchen knife buried in her chest, a thick pool of blood spreading around her and trickling between the cracks in the paving slabs, she was clearly the source of the scream they had heard.

Standing over her, with an expression of horror and disbelief frozen on her face,
was a woman in her early sixties, a woman of some affluence, judging by her clothing and jewellery. Not the usual type of person to be found in this neck of the woods, Muz thought.

Bloody foam was pouring from the open mouth of the young woman
on the floor, and crimson bubbles formed and burst rapidly around the blade of the knife where it plunged into her right breast. She was still alive, Amy realised, running over to assist her.

“Don’t get too close,” Chuck warned her. “It might bite.”

“No,” said the paramedic, kneeling in the blood and rolling the woman over onto her side, so that the blood from her punctured lung didn’t run into her remaining good one and drown her. “
She
isn’t displaying any signs of being infected.”

As Amy frantically tried to help the woman, Muz, Chuck
, and Carl turned to regard the elderly woman, the realisation of what had happened here stunning them into silence. It was a few seconds more before the silver-haired lady showed any signs of being aware of their presence, her eyes locked on that knife. Eventually, she looked up and regarded those around her, an imploring expression carved into her wrinkles.

“She just came from nowhere… She ran at me,” she stated flatly, again looking back down at the woman who was gasping pitifully, struggling to draw one last breath after another. “She ran at me… Her arms were out… I thought she was going to grab me.”

“Oh God,” Muz said, looking away and shaking his head. He too then dropped to a knee. “Tell me what to do,” he said to Amy.

“Okay, I need to take the knife out and make a flutter valve, so her lung can drain,” A
my told the others rapidly but calmly. “Chuck, give me that tape you’ve got. Muz, get me a thin sheet of plastic…”

As she was issuing the orders, the woman she was cradling shuddered violently, her eyes bulged and she went limp, a last gargle of expelled breath escaping her mouth. The bubbles around the base of the blade stopped forming. Normally
, at this point, Amy would have gone straight into CPR, which she wouldn’t stop until further help arrived, but with there being no hope of an ambulance turning up with the necessary equipment to keep the woman alive, she simply lowered her head to the ground and stood up.

Seeing this, tears flooded from the older woman’s eyes, though she made no sound. None of those gathered around her could find anything appropriate to say. The dog began to lick at the pool of blood until Muz
scared him away with a threat of a kick.

“I think..
.,” said the woman in the blood-sprayed Peter Hahn blazer, which had to have cost in excess of four hundred pounds. “I think she was simply relieved to see another person who wasn’t one of those awful biters. I think now that she was only running to come and give me a hug.”

The aging woman began to cry uncontrollably, wailing loudly in sorrow and despair at the horrific thing she had done. Amy reached up
and put an arm around the taller slender woman’s shoulders. It was a brave thing to do, Carl thought wryly, considering what the woman had done to the last person who had shown her physical affection.

Looking down to the dip in the road, Muz saw movement amid the cars; a number of people were emerging
from a side road. He could tell by the unnatural way they moved that they had succumbed to whatever modern day plague it was that was spreading across north London.

“We need to leave,” he announced.

The doors to the station were locked, which made sense as the outbreak had occurred in the small hours of the night. Muz lifted a bin from its base that secured it to the pavement and threw it through one of the glass panels of a door.

“Watch yourselves
on the glass,” he said, kicking out the remaining shards from the wooden frame. “Hurry up though. I don’t think they’ve seen us, but they’re heading our way.”

The others of the group needed no further prompt and crawled through the broken door into the foyer of the station.

“Come on. Watch your head,” Amy said to the woman, urging her into animation. “Don’t let the dog cut his paws on the glass,” she told Muz over her shoulder, as the man lured the dog through with the promise of a biscuit he produced from his bag.

Carl waited until the others had clambered through the hole, apprehensively watching the slowly advancing mass of cannibals,
and then quickly darted back to where the dead woman lay. Shielding his eyes so as not to look at her face, he ripped the knife from her chest, causing a final hot spurt of blood to emerge from the wound. Tucking the knife in the elasticated waist of his jogging bottoms, he stooped and climbed through the broken door.

Inside the station, they ran through the open barriers
and down the stairs that led to the platforms. Though the station had seemed secure from the front, they nonetheless were careful to search for anyone hiding and waiting to ambush them.

“Remember,” Chuck said
, “we thought we had searched the church but woke up to find that thing in there with us. We’re lucky it wasn’t diseased.”

As they reached the northern tip of the platforms, as one, they broke into a walk. Though they were worried that
the mass of people might have followed them into the station, there was no use in trying to run on the loose stones at the side of the tracks. A sprained or broken ankle was the last thing any of them needed.

Muz looked back, checking to see whether anyone was emerging from the stairs onto the platform. No
one was, but to his surprise, he did see someone stood on one corner of the roof of the station, looking down at the tracks. He instantly recognised the slim Indian man as the affected person who had saved him from the crowd the day before.

“Look,” he said to the others, pointing up at the roof and causing all but the older woman and the dog to turn and follow his finger.

Raj had been up there all night, staring morosely down at the tracks some fifty feet below him. He had climbed up to his current vantage point in order to find somewhere to jump from, and had been standing there ever since. His semi-decayed muscles and joints had locked up with hours of immobility. The only limb of his that had not cramped was his right arm, kept warm by the incessantly repeated action of punching himself in the head.

“What’s it doing that for?” Carl asked, watching the man on the roof continuing to inflict pain on himself.

“Dunno,” Muz replied.

With each self-inflicted blow to his temple
, the picture in Raj’s mind of Kate’s pained and pleading face disappeared for a moment in a flash of white pain.

“It’s crazy,” Chuck decided. “Probably doesn’t even know it’s doing it.”

This wasn’t the first roof Raj had climbed up to. The day previous, shortly after saving Muz, he had scuttled up a drainpipe onto the roof of one of the shops. From there, he had thrown himself into the road below. The fall hadn’t been enough to end his mental suffering however, and all he had gained for his efforts was a broken arm, making fending off attacks from the other amoeboid cell victims and this second climb all the more difficult.

As the band of survivors looked on from below and a little way up the tracks, Raj’s
knees and ankles finally loosened off enough to enable him to tilt himself forward and he plunged from the roof. They all winced at the sound of the dull thud of the man hitting the edge of the platform and flipping over onto the side of the track. Though they continued to watch him, he showed no more signs of life.

“Well, that’s that,” Carl said.

“What would make him do that?” Muz asked bleakly.

“Like I said, crazy,” Chuck replied. “I just wish the rest of them would do the same.”

They again headed off along the side of the tracks, Amy taking the arm of the elderly woman who was clearly trapped in the turmoil of her thoughts, her mind replaying over and over the scenario that had led her to kill that innocent girl.

“What’s your name?” Amy asked in an effort to drag her back to the present.

“Margaret,” the woman responded blankly.

“I’m Amy. These guys are Muz, Carl
, and Chuck.”

“Hi,” Carl nodded, trying to sound casual, though the look in his eyes told Margaret exactly what he thought about her.

To their left, on the other side of the mesh fencing, they passed the car park at the rear of the station. A couple of demented victims came running over on seeing them and pressed themselves up against the fence, biting uselessly at the wires. Knowing that the fence was too strong for them to break through and too high for the uncoordinated idiots to climb over, most of those on the tracks ignored the threat. Only Margaret responded, nervously backing away and edging dangerously close to the tracks before Amy took charge of her.