Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (32 page)

Standing over the lifeless corpse, Carl shook his injured hand, feeling it throb. Digby
, having stopped barking now but still growling cautiously, ventured over to sniff the body but Amy took hold of his collar and pulled him away.

“That was close,” Muz said, panting and staring at their victim’s head, now twisted round on his neck at unnatural angle.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Chuck said with huge cough, spitting the mucus from his throat into the dirt.

As the group
turned to head off once more, they heard the squeal of rupturing metal. As one, they turned back to face the fence and the crowd just beyond. One of the metal posts supporting the wire mesh, weakened by years of accumulated rust, was slowly buckling under the pressing weight of the mad mob. Then it broke in two. The fence collapsed, and as the massing people spewed over it, the group suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives.

A
mid the sudden attack, Amy found herself wrestling with a tall skinny man who, seeing her as the easiest prey, sprinted headlong at her. She managed to grab him by both wrists, desperately trying to prevent him from snatching hold of her. Looking around for help, she saw that the others of her group were far too busy fending off their own attackers to come to her aid.

Her only protector was her newfound friend, Digby. His fear evident by his tail being tucked between his legs, he fought his urge to run and instead bit down on
one of the attacker’s shoes. Though he felt his fangs splitting the bones inside the leather footwear, the man clawing at the nice woman barely even reacted. Digby snarled and tugged backward with all his weight, trying to pull the man off her.

It was sheer luck that the dog didn’t bite down on a less protected area of the man’s body or that his fangs didn’t penetrate the leather. If e
ither had been the case, it could have proved most unfortunate. All it needed was the beast to ingest a tiny amount of the man’s body tissue and he too could become infested with the spread of the voracious altered cells.

Thankfully
, Amy thought, the man she was struggling against was unable to bite her. Having literally bitten of more than he could chew, the toes of a foot could be seen protruding from his mouth. He must have tried to swallow the appendage virtually whole, as it was now jammed down his throat, forcing his jaw wide open and causing a tell-tale bulging lump in his neck.

The fir
st cannibal to rush at Muz was a man with a syringe jammed firmly in the pupil his right eyeball. As his eyes rolled wildly in his head, the syringe swung this way and that. As repulsed as Muz was, before the man could even touch him, he thrust out his hand and rammed the needle further into the man’s eye until the plastic tube pressed the orb deep into the socket.

To Muz’s great relief, the needle was both long and strong enough to rupture the rear of the eye socket and push through into the brain behind. The injury wasn’t enough
to drop the man completely, but it did end his attack. He staggered around without coordination. His left arm now hung limp at his side, his left leg barely able to take his weight, while he clawed frantically at his skull with the nails of his right hand.

Before Muz could compose himself however, he took
a huge blow to his gut, forcing the air from his lungs and pushing him off balance, so that he fell backwards and landed on his rump. If he hadn’t still been wearing his stab vest, the unexpected hit would have probably ruptured some of his organs.

Looking up, gaping like a guppy as he tried to re
-inflate his lungs, he regarded at the man who had run at him. The aging Arabic male with dark rings around his haunting eyes had a wooden fence post through his chest. It was this that had rammed Muz in the stomach.

Absently, the copper found himself considering what great height the man must have fallen from for the flat end of the
post to have driven through his torso as he had landed on it. Focus, he berated himself, frantically trying to pull his baton from its holster on his belt.

He heard Carl screaming
, and again failing to concentrate on the immediate threat to his own life, he looked around to see the man running in circles, trying his best to avoid the huge grasping arms of a six foot, twenty plus stone black nurse who was wobbling around after him, a lusting hunger written on her fat face.

The P
olish man confronted another of their attackers, a short round man with no less than fifty knives and forks jutting from his chest, back, arms and huge belly. A few of the forks still had strands of spaghetti hanging from them. He even had a teaspoon thrust into one socket down the side of an eye. Despite the numerous stab wounds, it was only Bolognese sauce that stained his clothing red.

“Looks to me maybe someone
mistake you for meatball,” the Polish man said, making a joke despite the life and death situation, before smacking the cutlery covered man square in one temple with his hammer.

Chuck came fighting through the crowd towards Amy, swinging his trusty candlestick at any head that came within his
eye line. He could see that tears were streaking down the tiny paramedics chubby cheeks, as she struggled to hold onto the arms of the tall man attacking her. The dog at her side was pulling the man around by one foot. By the way the extremity flopped around, Chuck could see that the animal’s powerful yanking on it had dislocated it at the ankle, and yet, he still managed to remain standing.

The man she was fighting, Chuck
now saw, was a doctor, judging by his clothes. Yet now, he was just as crazy as the rest of these people, the majority of whom had once been his mental health patients. What was wrong with the man’s neck, he thought, still lashing out with his weighty metal ornament, trying to reach Amy. Were there toes sticking out of his mouth?

Just as Chuck
thought this, with a loud crack, the doctor’s jaw dislocated allowing the semi-consumed foot to flop out into Amy’s face. The woman’s scream could have shattered glass. Weakened by her consuming fear, she finally buckled under the doctor’s attack. He fell upon her, the muscles of his face still working his dislocated jaw, causing it to swing unnaturally. His pelvis thrust back and forth with sexual desire. But before the demented doctor could either bite or penetrate her, Chuck swung at the side of his head with his weapon. The full force of both his thick arms gripping the stick caused a slice of scalp and shard of bone to go flying over the fence.

The doctor’s eyes rolled up in resignation and he slumped over onto his side. A portion of his brain was now exposed through the fresh aperture in his head
and seeing this, a couple of other cannibals converged and began to fight over him.

Amy couldn’t even manage a ‘thank you’ as Chuck pulled her to her feet, her snot and tear drenched face screwed up in an expression of pure panic.

Still struggling with the human skewer that wouldn’t leave him alone, Muz had managed to get back to his feet, but again, fell backwards as he avoided the heavy wooden post that had already painfully struck him several times. He tripped over the nearest train track, and as he hit the ground, to his horror, saw that his head was no more than a foot from the power line.

Directly beside him, s
ome of the crazies who had been unfortunate enough to step onto this rail now lay slumped and twitching across the tracks. With their brains cooking nicely inside their heads, at least these few people no longer presented any threat. The stink of burning skin and hair filled Muz’s injured lungs.

C
lasping at the stone chips around him, he threw two fistfuls of them at the cannibal. They had absolutely no effect on the man. Reaching for more, the fingertips of one of his hands then fell upon a lump of metal. Looking at it, he saw it was a loose rail spike, used to secure sleepers to the ground. His fingers flicked as he tried to grab it, but it was too late.

As his mad assailant came at him again and fell forward to pin him down, Muz winced, expecting that wooden post
to jam hard into his ribs and knock what was left of the fight right out of him. The Polish man came to his rescue however, using his considerable bodyweight to push the other man aside before he landed on Muz. The stocky drunk then followed up by mercilessly hammering at the Arabic man’s face, until it sickeningly resembled a bowl of raw meat.

Muz wasted no time scrabbling back to his feet despite the pressing pain he still felt in his chest
, snatching up the metal spike as he did so. He saw Carl, straddling the massive black woman who now lay motionless on her back. Despite her no longer moving, he was thrusting a large kitchen knife repeatedly into various parts of her bulbous body, a noise somewhere between a war cry and a child’s wail coming from his open mouth.

“She’s done, mate,” Muz told him, walking over without getting too close.
He was worried Carl might lash out at him in his current state of mind. “She’s done.”

Surprisingly, not a single crazy person remained standing. The man with the syringe in his eye was
hopelessly thrashing away in a bush by the fence. A couple of the people laying over the power line still twitched but, other than that, the rest of the crowd that had come at them now lay motionless in the dirt. Muz knew that it was mainly down to Chuck and the Polish man that they had survived this encounter. If either of the two powerful men hadn’t been present, he would not be standing there rubbing at his injuries, of that he had no doubt.

“Where’s Margaret?” Amy asked meekly, he
r chin still quivering.

The older woman had disappeared. Though they searched their immediate area, checking each body, no
one could find her. It was Carl, standing on the chest of the corpse of the black woman, who saw her.

“She’s over there,” he called out, pointing ahead of them up the track.

The woman, little more than a far off dot, had run off, managing to put some considerable distance between her and the fight.

“We’d better get after her,” Muz said, breaking into a pained trot. “Be careful; that power line is definitely still live.”

They scurried along once more by the side of the tracks, Amy calling after Margaret while Chuck repeated told her not to shout. As the group finally caught up to the elderly lady, they saw she appeared to have completely lost all control of herself. She was a gibbering mess, stumbling forward with the fixed blank expression of a war weary veteran. Despite Amy’s attempts to comfort her and stop her from walking, so that she could check her over for injuries, the woman continued striding onward, as though she weren’t even aware of the others’ presence. She muttered to herself under her breath, the words barely audible.

“What’s she saying?” Carl asked.

“Something about the dead rising,” Amy responded. “Revelations. She’s not making much sense.”

“Margaret, look at me,” Muz said forcefully but as softly as he co
uld. “You need to take control of yourself. We’re going to get through this. All of us.”

Carl gave a derisive and nervous snort.

“Yeah, snap out of it,” Chuck added coldly.

“She’s not in a good way,” Amy said in a whisper, turning to Muz. “We need to get her out of danger before she completely loses it.”

Muz looked ahead of them. He could just make out the tops of the tower blocks above the bridge they were about to pass under. The high-rise buildings were still a way off. He picked up the pace and urged the others to do the same.

Looking over at Carl walking beside him, Muz looked at the
blood-drenched knife he still clutched in his fist.

“Where did you get
…?” he began to ask, but stopped himself mid-sentence. Remembering the girl Margaret had stabbed through the chest back on Watling Avenue, he found the answer to his question. “Classy, mate. Real classy.”

Carl shrugged back at him. “Needs as must.”

“Judgement,” Margaret now said loudly. She had clearly retreated deep within herself. She then began to mutter quietly again. “The end will give rise to a new age…”

After this, Margaret began to drop behind
the group, slowing them down, as they kept having to reduce their speed in order to accommodate her. Amy, walking alongside her, held onto her hand. Looking up at the taller woman, she saw she had a distant look in her eyes, as though in her mind she was somewhere else. Amy was grateful to have her as a patient. As long as she had the other woman to focus on, she didn’t have to dwell on her own faltering sanity.

It wasn’t just Margaret and Amy who were suffering the overwhelming stress of what they had just gone through. Everyone else
’s nerves were frayed, with the possible exception of the Polish man, who had the calming benefit of alcohol in his system.

“We can
’t keep having confrontations like that,” Muz said to anyone who was close enough to hear him. “Eventually, we’re going to lose.”

“I
’m surprised we haven’t already,” Carl added morosely.

“Exactly,” Chuck sighed. “We need to take shelter in thos
e blocks, like I’ve been saying the whole time.”

Muz, worried about the elderly Margaret’s mental condition, concerned that Amy’s menstruation would keep bringing tho
se psychos down on them, and thankful for Chuck’s effort in that last fight, began to start coming round to the big black man’s line of thinking. Maybe the tower blocks were their best option for the time being.