Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel (36 page)

Margaret released an almighty scream, one of anger rather than fear, in response to being in the eye of a tornado of insanity that now fully encircled her. Her face grim with determination, she tried to get to her feet but Amy pulled her back down.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the plump young woman assured her, though the tears tumbling down her cheeks and the tremble in her voice said otherwise.

Margaret stared back fixedly, he
r eyes brimming with rage.

Just
then, they heard a high-pitched war cry. Amy looked up to see, running from across the road, there came a slim boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen years. He was waving a small hatchet in one hand and a wooden baseball bat in the other. As he sprinted towards the fight, the hood of his black top came down, revealing a pale fresh face and a head of shaved blonde hair. With a skill and ferocity that should have been beyond his years, he swung and hacked at the cannibals, joining Chuck and Tom in their defiant stance.

Seeing this new arrival beside him, Chuck, a good head and shoulders taller and well over twice his body weight, took a good second to look him up and down. The boy’s otherwise whiter than white trainers that still bore their store tags were spattered with dried blood.

“Who the hell are you?” was all Chuck could think to ask.

“Yo,” the boy responded, as he continued to help in holding off the crazies. “I’m your rescue, innit.”

Chuck shrugged dismissively and returned his full attention to the psychotic crowd. The zombies just seemed to keep pouring out of the blocks, and they needed all the help they could get – even from a little boy.

Muz hastily checked Carl for any signs of life. He wasn’t breathing. The copper gave a quick look over both shoulders to where the others were fighting the cannibal crowd. Thankfully, all the infected were currently too focused on trying to get at Amy to notice Muz bent over Carl’s limp body.

He wiped the man’s face thoroughly with the sleeve of his shirt, cleaning away the shit and intestinal goo. Prising Carl’s jaw open, he looked inside his mouth to make sure none of the filth was inside and checked the airway. Taking in a lungful of air, he then pressed his mouth around Carl’s and exhaled, checking to see that it caused the other man’s chest to rise. He did this again and again with no response.

Only after the fourth shared breath did Carl suddenly jolt. His eyes flicked wide open and he looked bla
nkly up at Muz. With a speed the copper couldn’t defend against, Carl thrust up with both hands, grabbed him by the throat and pulled his head down towards his own.

“What the hell, man?” Carl yelled, spitting in disgust. “There was no need for that.”

He released the copper’s neck and Muz actually felt dizzy with relief on seeing colour beginning to flood back into Carl’s cheeks, though his lips were still a little blue.

“Make sure you don’t swallow any of that… that…” Muz couldn’t complete the sentence for retching at the sight of the globs of faeces dribbling down Carl’s cheeks.

A splitting crack cut through the air. It was the rapport of Chuck’s handgun. Though he had only a few rounds, which he really wanted to conserve, and he knew the sound could bring more cannibals – or even those cows – Chuck had resorted in desperation to using the weapon against the overwhelming numbers. The gunshots served to remind Muz they were still in the thick of it and he immediately jumped back to his feet. He pulled Carl up off the ground and turned to see the rest of their group.

He couldn’t even see the women and the dog now. He could barely make out, amid the tight mass of forms, the flailing arms of Chuck and Tom, still defen
ding them. They were losing badly.

Knowing now that they could not possibly win this fight, Muz’s brain ordered him to leave the others and make a run for it. Save yourself, a voice yelled inside his head. Instead, legs wobbling with fear, he ploughed his way back into the fight, attacking
the cannibals from the rear. Where did that boy come from, he thought absently, catching sight of the youth in the corner of his vision. He managed to drop a couple of the crazies with his baton and spike before they even saw who had mercilessly struck them down.

Carl did not follow him. Woozy, he simply stood staring at the grass beneath his feet, an expression of total disbelief etched across his face. Was his oxygen-starved brain playing tricks on him, causing him to hallucinate? Or was he actually standing over
an MP-5 assault rifle? He blinked at it several times. It was just lying there in the grass, as though there was nothing unusual about such a specialist military weapon being here.

Not daring to ask himself how it had got there, he picked it up and felt its very real weight in his hands. Turning it over, he looked for the safety lever. He knew a little about firearms from having avidly read Guns n’ Ammo magazines as an adolescent
, but he had never fired a gun, except for an air rifle a few times. He had never even held one.

A loud cutting noise now drowned out the sounds of moaning, snarling and hissing, of men grunting with effort as they hacked into the meat of other men. Drawn by the promise of newsworthy dramatic images, a Press helicopter rapidly approached from the west. With a cameraman hanging from an open side door, documenting the grim fight below, coldly recording the suffering of the survivors, it circled in the air.

Tom growled angrily at those in the aircraft above, knowing from previous experience that the reporters would not rescue them.

“If that thing comes down close enough,” Chuck shouted, “I’
m going to throw this candle stick up through the rotor blades.”

“I can do one better,” Carl yelled over the noise from above and fired several shots from the assault rifle into the air.

The weapon leapt back and upwards in his hands and the stock smacked him square in the face. His lower lip split and blood coursed down his chin. He didn’t care. He bore bloodied teeth, as a mad grin spread from cheek to cheek.

“Christ on a bike!” Muz screamed. “Where in God’s name did you get that?”

Seeing Carl’s unaimed firing of the rifle, the helicopter’s pilot took action. The chopper banked and flew off, away from the danger and any stray rounds.

“Yeah, piss off,” Carl shouted after it.

He turned the MP-5 on the crowd of biting crazies then and again pulled the trigger. Muz, Chuck, Tom and the new boy dropped to the dirt, cowering next to Amy, Margaret and Digby. Carl must have caught a catch somehow because, rather than the previous single shots, the weapon released a fully automatic barrage of rounds into the masses. The weapon danced wildly in his inept hands, striking down almost a third of the attackers in less than a second. It was a miracle none of the survivors was hit.

“Fuck, yes!” he shouted with utter glee, as he released more rounds into the crowd. “This is definitely going on my CV.”

“Gimme that thing before you kill one of us,” Chuck demanded forcefully.

“Get off. I found it,” Carl protested, pulling the weapon tight to his chest protectively
, as though it were baby. His finger was still hooked around the trigger.

“Okay, you keep it
, but just let me show you how to…,” Chuck said calmly now, slowly walking towards Carl.

Carl gripped the assault rifle even tighter but didn’t back away when Chuck reached out. The big man, using only the tips of his fingers, to show he wasn’t going to snatch the weapon, pressed a catch and extended the collapsible stock until it clicked into place. He then switched a lever, returning the weapon to semi-auto single shot mode.

“Now put that in the crook of your shoulder and pull it in tight before you fire,” the big man told him.

What Chuck had really wanted to do was
tear the rifle out of the idiot’s hands and beat him with it, but he wasn’t about to get into a wrestling match with an armed man, no matter how scrawny he was.

Carl did exactly as he was told and levelled the barrel towards Chuck. As the African man’s eyed widened, he fired over his shoulder, bursting the head of a psycho who had lunged from the crowd and had been about to bite into Chuck’s thick neck.

With a smile and a wink, Carl pushed past Chuck and ran to the aid of the others. He would have preferred to have kept his distance from the murderous masses but he knew getting up close made kill shots far more likely. Squeezing the trigger, he began popping heads, sending cranial shards and minced brain spattering everywhere.

“Yous lot got some pieces,” the hooded youth remarked,
nodding in particular at Carl’s assault rifle, while hacking furiously at the face of an old Chinese man. “That ting is serious, bruv.”

Carl managed swiftly
to despatch several more of the cannibals before the weapon’s cocking lever snapped back, expelling the last round and revealing an empty breach. He moaned in despair, looking down forlornly at the now useless MP-5. He refused to cast it aside though. Who knew, he thought hopefully, he might find more magazines somewhere. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder by its strap, he searched amid the numerous still twisting bodies for his knife. Finding the blade, he set about helping the others, who were still fighting valiantly at close quarters with the remaining attackers.

Tom swung at the head of a young Greek-looking man. The blow didn’t bare his usual strength, heavily fatigued as he was, but it was enough cause the man’s scalp to flap open. As the olive-skinned male dropped, Tom kneed him in the face, throwing him back to crack his exposed skull on the pavement. Without waiting to see how badly affected the man might be by this, Tom then jumped in the air. He landed with both boots on his head. The full consid
erable weight of the Pole cracked the bones of his face. Snot and clots sprayed from his nose and mouth.

Again, without so much as a pause, despite feeling utterly spent, he spun to pick his next victim. There were none. None of them could actually believe it
, but they had done it, they had taken down the entire crowd.

The bedraggled and worn band
, each of the men drenched in sweat, was surrounded by in excess of fifty bodies. They weren’t entirely dead, as the twitching and flapping of their various limbs showed, but not a single one had any fight left. This was a good thing, as everyone of the survivors felt exactly the same way. Even Amy and Margaret were totally mentally drained by their terror of the fight.

“W
here the hell… did you… come from?” Muz wheezed at the youth beside him.

“Been staying in Bredon Court,” the young man responded, eying Muz’s uniform. “Mum had a flat there. I came up here to find her…” He trailed off.

“Boy fight good,” Tom praised him. “Strong and brave, like Polska.”

“Hey, I ain’t no boy. You get me?”
the youth responded.

Tom laughed as hard as his tired lungs would allow and slapped him betwee
n the shoulder blades. The youngster staggered forward but tried not to show how much it hurt.

“Did anyone else notice,” Chuck asked after his compulsory coughing fit, “that, other than Amy, the zombies were mainly coming for me?”

“Paranoid,” Carl replied.

“They were,” the big man growled.

“It’s ’cos you fat, blood. You a bigger meal, more appetisin’ innit,” the lad told him. He stated it as a simple fact rather than an insult.

“Who’s this cheeky little shit think he is?” Chuck snarled back at him.

“Easy cuz,” the youth said defensively, stepping back. “Remember who just rescued you.”

Muz shook his head in despair of the boy’s affected gangster accent and posturing. “As I was saying, rich cultural diversity,” he remarked with a dry smile.

With the smell of raw meat filling his nose and feeling even more hungry than usual, Digby slipped free of Amy’s weakened grip and lumbered towards the nearest of the dead.

“No!”
both the paramedic and Margaret yelled simultaneously, as they scrambled after him.

Grabbing hold of the dog, Amy looked at the older woman.

“You feeling a little better?” she asked.

Margaret nodded, her face set with a stern resolve. Amy smiled with relief.

“Well, at least that should have gone a long way to clearing the block of infestation,” Chuck remarked. “Now let’s get inside. The rifle fire has more than likely drawn the attention of that herd.”

Remembering those huge afflicted beasts, predators they couldn’t possibly hope to kill, the group sprang into life and headed for th
e main entrance of Salisbury Court. As they did so, yet another person came treading down the stairs within.

Emerging through the doors out into the open, there walked a naked girl. She was one of the few afflicted who still looked fresh, her unclothed body a healthy unblemished pink, and must have therefore been a very recent victim. If they had managed to reach here a little sooner, maybe they could have saved her from her horrible fate, Muz thought sadly. Her long blonde hair hung in a matted mess down her slender back and over her meagre br
easts. Her fringe was almost as long as the rest and a section of it disappeared into her open mouth. It seemed the locks had gotten in the way of her feeding and she had gulped them down her throat, along with the pieces of the person she had consumed. Drool hung from her delicate jaw line, as she wretched continuously in an effort to choke up the hair that currently extended down into and tickled her stomach.