Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (53 page)

“Slim to none,” he admitted. “Anything with mammalian DNA that ingests or otherwise absorbs infected tissue faces a certain fate. There can be no immunity.”

“You said only mammal DNA?” Amy asked.

“Yes,” Raj responded.

“So it doesn’t affect birds
, fish, or insects then?”

“No.”

“So there’s hope that the cordons will contain it,” the woman asked, desperate for a positive response.

“There’s always hope,”
Raj replied.

“Not for you, mate,” Muz told the doctor in no uncertain terms. “You’re going to pay for what you’ve unleashed on the world. We’re handing you over to the military and I hope they dissect you while you’re still alive, or whatever you are now.”

Chuck was still stood there, staring down at the ex-zombie, his mind a whirlwind. The Indian man had recovered from death itself, so maybe this infection he had created could actually cure his cancer. What would happen if he were to allow himself to become infected, he wondered. Would he be lucky enough to come through it, like Raj and Sam had? Given the overwhelming number of rotting animated corpses he had seen, the odds were heavily stacked against it.

Raj’s own mind was racing too. Only a minute ago he had been resigned to death as his bes
t option. Now though, he had overcome such self-indulgent thoughts of shutting off his anguish by allowing Muz to kill him. Seeing the bigger picture, he began to consider how he might be able to swing the odds in humanity’s favour.

“I know that is what I deserve,” Raj said to Muz. “But I can’t allow you to do that.”

“You not have choice,” Tom said menacingly.

“I should leave,” Raj said, trying to sound non-confrontational.

Tom picked up the lump hammer from beside the chair and Muz walked over to bar the doorway to the hall.

“You’re not going to walk out of here Scott-free,” Muz told Raj defiantly. “Your body may hold a cure and if they have to cut it out of you, well, that’s just tough shit for you.”

Raj sighed. He knew that, if they all came at him at once, he could easily overpower every single person in the room, even the dog, but he didn’t want a fight. He couldn’t blame them for behaving like this.

“I may still be able to rectify this to some degree,” he said
, “but I need to leave in order to do so.”

“Rectify?” Muz blurted back at him. “How can you possibly rectify all that’s happened?”

“You not go nowhere,” Tom said.

As R
aj moved towards Muz and the door, Tom swung the hammer at his head from behind. Hearing the grunt of the man’s effort and the passage of the heavy metal through the air, Raj easily stepped aside and avoided the clumsy swing without even having to look back. Tom however was not put off and he swung at him again.

This time
, realising the stocky Pole was not going to stop, Raj ducked under the arc of the hammer’s swing. Turning and dropping to all fours, he sprang at Tom with the speed of a striking snake. His head struck the bulky man square in the sternum, knocking the wind out of him and pushing him back down into his chair.

Digby ran at him then, biting down on the sleeve of his hoody and ragged it mercilessly.
Before the inhuman doctor could shake the dog off, Muz came at him from behind and Sam from the side. He heard their footfalls on the soft carpet beneath the snarling of the dog though and he sighed again.

Kicking out with his legs with all the force of a mule, he struck Muz in the gut. The copper was lifted off his feet and slammed against a wall.
Raj then stood upright. With the heavy animal hanging from one arm, he flung out the other at Sam, back-slapping him so hard across his face that it stopped him in his tracks, dizzy from the blow.

Chuck, disturbed from his trance, ran at the inhuman Indian then, hoping to catch him in a bear hug and squeeze the air from his lungs. Raj however stopped the attack dead with a single punch to his throat, the point he knew would cause him the most discomfort. Chuck staggered back, clutching at his neck and coughing violently.

“Stop it!” Amy yelled.

The room went still at her command. Even Digby let go of Raj’s tattered sleeve and stopped growling. The men all looked at her, while warily watching Raj and he them.

“You’re behaving like morons,” Amy told them. “So it’s his fault. Acting like this won’t undo what has happened. It won’t help us.”

The three
men and the two inhumans looked sheepish in response to being talked to like children.

“Raj,” Amy continued after a moment, when she was happy that the men weren’t about to start on each other again. “Why do you feel you need to leave? What do you possibly think you can do?”

“I went through Sam’s pockets earlier,” he said to the woman’s surprise. “I was just looking for some ID, something with his real name on it. I didn’t see any but I did find others bits of paperwork, a dry-cleaning receipt, a supermarket receipt and other stuff. They were all from Mill Hill.”

“I don’t see the significance,” Amy responded.

“Sam is from Mill Hill,” Raj stated, as though that should explain everything.

Amy shook her head. “You’re going to have to give me a bit more of a clue than that.”

“He’s therefore one of the first to be infected. I’m the first,” Raj said, explaining as plainly as he could. “There has to be some correlation between that and the fact that we, out of the countless people infected, are the only two we know to have recovered.”

“You want to go back to Mill Hill,” Amy said, at last beginning to understand.

Raj nodded.

“You think you will find more like you and Sam.”

“It may be that only the first, second, third, possibly even fourth generation infected people have received a version of the amoeboid cells that is capable of performing the task for which they were designed,” Raj explained further.

“It’s far too risky,” Amy told him. “You’ll be killed.”

“The more specimens like me and Sam that I can gather, the greater the chances will be of creating a form of inoculation,” Raj insisted.

“Okay, I agree that if there’s any more recovered victims, that’s where they’re most likely to be
, but it’s not a certainty,” Amy argued back. “You’re too important to lose on some guilt-fuelled wild goose chase.”

“But if I…”

“No. You’re staying with us,” Amy said conclusively. “And we’re taking you to the military.”

The other men in the room muttered their agreement at that last remark.

Raj reluctantly conceded. He could see no malice in the woman’s face as she spoke. She was simply stating the logical truth. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, as the saying went. Sidestepping around Sam and Chuck, who was still coughing badly, he went and sat back on the sofa. The other men in the room visibly relaxed.

With the situation having been diffused, the little paramedic took to examining Sam once more, checking that he hadn’t somehow injured himself during his attack on Raj. She popped a small home oral thermometer into his throat hole. As she pressed at the lump of gummy
scar tissue around the hole, it tore a little. With a trickle of blood, a tiny tooth protruded slightly from the flesh.

“There’s bone tissue in there,” Amy said absently, as though the fight had never happened. “There’s new muscle forming too. I guess that tooth confirms it though; he’s growing a new jaw.”

“How can you bear to touch that?” Chuck asked, still fighting to take control of his coughing.

“He has a highly elevated temperature,” Amy
continued, drawing the drool covered glass tube from Sam’s hole and examining it.

“Is bad?” Tom asked.

“Not necessarily,” Amy told him. “Given the incredible rate of tissue growth, I think it could be considered normal.”

“Normal?” Tom repeated, raising his bushy eyebrows.

“Well, you know what I mean,” Amy replied. “Look at his arm. I think it’s grown about eight centimetres since yesterday. Can you believe that?”

“Like an
axolotl,” Raj murmured.

Amy looked across at him blankly. “What did you say?”

“Do you know what an axolotl is?” he asked her.

The woman shook her head but Sam nodded and raised his stubby arm. Spit bubbles burbled out of his hole, as he tried to voice his answer.

“It’s a species of tadpole that never matures into a salamander,” Raj told Amy. “Its physiology has a level of cellular regrowth unparalleled in the animal kingdom. They are able to regrow lost limbs completely. I was the first to isolate the coding in their genome that allows them to do so.”

“Let me guess,” Amy said. “You somehow transferred that coding to your own special experimental cells.”

Raj nodded at her. “As you’ve seen in that giant amoeboid mass you described…”

“The blob?” Chuck clarified. “Another of your abominations.”

“The blob,” Raj said wearily. “As you’ve seen in that blob, cellular de-specialisation alone is of little medical worth. Only cells that can then rebuild themselves into lost or damaged tissue are of any benefit.”

How are you feeling?”
Amy asked, turning to Sam, in an effort not to get angry at Raj.

The man burbled and nodded. The tone of his voice suggested that he was okay.

“Good,” Amy said with a smile at him.

“We should get them to the cordon straight away,” Chuck said.

He wanted rid of the ex-zombies more than he had previously, now that he had seen what Raj was capable of. He also felt a rising urge to get them to someone who could study them, someone who might develop a cure for the other zombies who were not yet too far gone. If they could make a cure that could bring them back from the dead, as Raj and Sam had, maybe that same cure could reverse the cancerous rot that was spreading within him.

“I agree,” Muz said.

“Okay, Muz, Tom, get your shit together,” Chuck said decisively. “We’re going now.”

“We should all go,” Muz said.

“Whatever,” Chuck said dismissively.

Eagerly Tom got to his feet, rubbing at his sore ribs. Snatching up his satchel and hammer, he went and stood by the front door, waiting for the others.

“All of us?” Amy asked
Muz, reluctant to leave.

“Yeah. I suppose you’d better bring your dog as well,”
the copper told her.

“Why do I need to go?”
Amy continued to question the decision.

“Because
, maybe by now they’ve managed to set up a quarantined research facility and they’ll let us through the cordon this time,” Muz said. “You don’t want to be left here on your own, do you?”

Amy
patted her leg and called Digby to her. In the hallway, she selected a nine iron golf club from the pile of weapons they had been gathering and storing near the front door. She didn’t like the idea of having to use a weapon at all but at least it was nice and light and, with its long reach, she should be able to keep any attackers at a distance.

Stepping through the main doors on the ground floor, they found that it was still raining outside but had now reduced to no more than a
drizzle. As they left the block and the others immediately jumped into the Jankel, Raj instead was drawn to a man in the road, one of the few remaining afflicted people who still possessed the strength and mental coordination to drag himself on his stomach through the estate. The doctor in Raj was transfixed in close scrutiny of the decaying man, who feebly reached out a clawing arm at him.

“Hey. Get in this bleeding truck,” Chuck called out, drawing his handgun in readiness, thinking Raj might be about to bolt.

Raj, squatting to get a closer look, was so engrossed in his observation of the man though that he didn’t respond.

“Look at the way he’s examining that thing,” Chuck said in disgust. “Does anyone else find that creepy?”

“Creepy,” Tom agreed.

“Cre
epy? It’s downright sick,” Muz said.

“He’s a scientist,” Amy stated.
“He’s just trying to figure out what’s making them tick, I suppose.”

“It’s still bloody sick
,” Muz added, astonished and annoyed that Amy would think to defend the man.

It took several further shouted commands from both Chuck and Muz before
Raj finally lifted his head and looked back at them with those cold glistening eyes. Standing upright, he placed a foot on the undead man’s neck and pressed down hard, until he heard the vertebrae crack. Satisfied that the sad victim was as dead as he was going to get, Raj then walked over to the truck and climbed in the rear with Tom, Amy, Sam and the dog. They all regarded him warily.

After routinely checking that all the locks were secured, Muz started up the engine and drove off. He had to work the steering wheel this way and that, struggling to maintain a straight course even at
low speed, as the left side front wheel rim scraped noisily along the road. Weaving his way down Kings Drive, he came to the junction with Orchard Drive, at the far end of which could be seen the A5.