Above him, he now saw the Union flag mounted on the pole that rose up from the left corner of the balcony. Some joker had lowered the flag to half-mast.
Having gathered enough of his breath to be able to move again, Muz pushed through the door back into the canteen, just as Chuck and Carl ambled back into the room, blithely unaware of what had just happened.
“I’m going commando,” Carl announced with a smile. “I had to bin my underpants.”
“Oh great, I’m still half starved,” Chuck said, seeing the smashed vending machine, which he assumed Muz had broken into using the plant pot laying on the floor. He reached in to retrieve the confectionary. “If you hadn’t broken the thing open, I was going to.”
Muz simply stood in front of the two of them, convinced that his fatigue and demeanour surely had to c
onvey the ordeal he had just been through, but the men remained oblivious. Well, if they weren’t going to ask any questions, Muz thought, he wasn’t going to say anything. The last thing he wanted to do right now was recount the event and openly admit to having just murdered a woman, a fellow police officer.
Carl joined Chuck in raiding the vending machine for its contents and between
them, they devoured five packets of crisps and four chocolate bars. Muz found he couldn’t watch. The act of eating, such a mundane everyday necessity, at the minute filled him with revulsion, having so recently almost become a meal himself.
“
So, what’s the plan, officer?” Carl asked, as he idly practised swinging his crowbar like a golf club. “Where do we go from here?”
“I’ve been heading west since this began,” Muz responded, forcing himself to focus on the present rather than those horrific images replaying in his mind. “I suppose it’s only logical that to reach the boundar
y of the quarantine as fast as possible, I should keep heading in the same direction.”
“I disagree. I think you should go north,” Chuck said. He had an expression of stern insistence
, which didn’t quite have the effect it should have, due to the man still wearing his suit jacket over the top of his white custody pullover, making him look more than a little ridiculous. “If you go north, it’s only a few miles before you’re out of these north London extremities. The population density would be dramatically lower, which means fewer zombies and a better chance of surviving this mess.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point there,” Muz admitted, having mulled over what Chuck had said.
“I’m heading north anyway, no matter what you decide,” Chuck told him. “I think trying to get to the cordon is stupid. I just want to find a good defensive position, gather some provisions, and wait until all this calms down.”
He looked out the windows to the north, way past the nearby Grahame Park estate whose blocks only stood a maximum of four storeys, to a cluster of towers
that could be seen through the grey gloom of the moist air.
“You see those tower blocks over there?” Chuck asked. “I think a flat at the top of one of those is about as safe as you’re going to get.”
Muz and Carl followed Chuck’s extended finger to those far off blocks that jutted skyward high above their neighbours.
“That’s the Stonegrove estate,” Muz said. “It’s quite a walk, all things considered.”
“Well, I’d better hope I find another car then,” Chuck replied.
“The streets aren’t safe
and the likelihood of finding a usable car has proven to be slim,” Carl butted in. “We all know that the chances of making it all that way would be remote, unless we could find another route like we did with the M1 and the train line that got us here.”
“There’s the Northern line,” Muz declared. “Colindale tube station is only a few hundred metres down the road and the rail line would take us all the way up to Edgware station, falling not too far short of those towers.”
“The Underground?” Chuck asked. “Do you really want to face being trapped in a tunnel with a crowd of zombies after you?”
“The tube line’s all above ground from here northbound,” Muz clarified.
“The tracks are fenced off on both sides all the way.”
“Hmm,” Chuck mused. “Sounds good. Looks like you’ve got the pleasure of my company for a while longer then.”
“Brilliant,” Carl grumbled.
“We just need to get to Colindale tube station then,” Muz said grimly. On any normal
day, it would have been no more than a short ten-minute stroll. It was unlikely to be quite so simple today though.
The three men stood in silence, looking out at their new goal. Reaching those drab grey towers seemed like a daunting task. After a time,
Muz suddenly realised that the fourth member of their little band was still absent.
“Either of you two seen Jenna?” he asked.
The two other men shook their heads, as they continued to stuff their cheeks with stolen confectionary.
“We should check on her,” Muz said, in light of what had happened to him.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Carl told him. “There’s no one besides us in the whole building.”
“I
wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Muz replied.
“He’s right,” Chuck said, agreeing with Muz. “She’s been gone a while and the building hasn’t been properly cleared.
There’s two whole floors we haven’t even checked yet.”
All three of them went back out into the corridor,
past the stairwell and the gents’ toilets and stopped at the door with a symbol of a woman on it.
“Jenna?” Muz called out, knocking on the door. “Everything okay?”
When he got no reply, he knocked again, louder this time. Still there was no response, so he edged the door ajar and called out the woman’s name again. Peering through, he saw that there was another door just beyond this. Coming from beyond that still closed door, he could now hear a strange muffled sound. It was so muted that it was difficult to tell but it sounded like grunting.
“Can you hear that?” Muz asked the other men.
“Maybe she’s dropping a big one,” Carl suggested.
Muz glared at him. “We’re coming in,” he shouted and pushed open the second door.
The three of them now saw Jenna lying on the floor by the cubicles. She was on her back, her head lolling to one side with a catatonic look upon her face. On top of her and between her parted legs was a young-looking male police officer. He had the same wide eyes as all the other afflicted people they had seen. It appeared he had torn open the seam at the crotch of his trousers, in order for him to be able to both fuck and eat the woman that seemed resigned to her fate beneath him. As he violently pumped his erect phallus into her, causing her to rock back and forth, and tore with his teeth at her neck and chest, though still conscious, she showed no signs of even being aware of what was happening.
Hunger and the desire to mate are very closely
related sensations, both originating within the temporal lobe of the brain, and both causing a person to lust after flesh. This, coupled with the onset of decay in his prefrontal cortex, the organ responsible for orchestrating thought and actions and supressing urges, had caused a state of confusion in the broken mind of this particular copper. He was therefore doing his damnedest to slake both those needs.
Jenna began
involuntarily to urinate over the floor and the man, but it did nothing to stop his hard, rapid thrusting. She was a bony, meagre prey, with no rich-tasting fat whatsoever but the police officer was still able to take some sustenance from her wiry muscles. Jenna’s eyes, sunken in their sockets, now showed some signs of life and rolled in her head to look up at the man currently raping and killing her. Yet still, she bore no expression at all.
As Chuck saw this happening righ
t in front of him, a primal instinct to protect the woman kicked in. He shoved the other two men aside and stepped into the room. Pulling a Browning nine millimetre semi-automatic pistol from his inside jacket pocket, he pulled back the slide and allowed it to snap forwards, lifting a round from the magazine. Without a second’s hesitation, he then pulled the trigger and with a deafening bang, the officer’s head came apart as though it were no more than an overripe pumpkin. As sprayed blood and tiny fragments of brain tissue and cranial bone trickled down the far wall of the room, Chuck stared wide-eyed at what he had done.
Bloody bubbles formed in the corners of Jenna’s mouth and spilled out
, to course down her neck as she started to convulse, her head and limbs beating against the hard tiles.
“She’s going into shock,” Muz said, barely comprehending what had just happened
, as he rushed to her side.
“No, she’s not,” Chuck told him. “Get away from her. She’s changing.”
Chuck knew nothing about the genetically altered amoeboid cells currently racing through Jenna’s bloodstream or how, once they infected a host, they took only twenty three seconds on average to circulate the entire body and only a little longer than that to start spreading their genetic coding to the majority of the native cells. All he knew, from the people he had seen become victims so far, was that once they showed signs of changing, it wasn’t going to be long before they were back on their feet and attacking him.
As he repeated
ly warned Muz to step away from Jenna, the woman’s convulsions came to a sudden stop and her chest no longer rose and fell. She was completely limp and seemingly devoid of all life, as the men stood over her with complex expressions of terror, disbelief, pity and disgust. She lay motionless for well over a minute, the men doing and saying nothing but look down at her, before she jerked back to apparent life.
Muz began to stoop,
so as to help her, but her head whipped around to regard him with insane eyes. A guttural growl emerged from her throat as her lips peeled back from her teeth. Chuck required no further confirmation. Raising his weapon, he again pulled the trigger and the back of Jenna’s head exploded across the floor.
Again,
the three of them simply stood immobile, taking in the surrounding gore. The headless police officer was still moving, his pelvic thrusts only slowly diminishing. When Chuck was finally able to lift his eyes from his two victims on the floor and became aware once again of his surroundings, he saw Muz and Carl regarding both him and the firearm in his hands with open apprehension.
“What?” he asked. “You think this is mine, don’t you?”
The other men stood silent and tense, fixating on the weapon.
“You think that because I’m a well-dressed black man driving a brand new BMW, I must be a drug dealer or something?”
“Whoa, Chuck. Nobody’s saying that,” Muz assured him.
“No
, but you’re thinking it. I can see it,” Chuck said. “If you must know, I got it from some zombie pig like this one, who tried to eat me before I caved his head in.”
“That makes me feel so much better about you,” Muz replied.
The big man had no ill feelings towards the police generally and wouldn’t normally use such terms, but at this very moment, he needed to verbally attack the men staring at him, in order to avoid their questioning eyes.
“I need to get out of here,” Ca
rl said, beginning to wretch, bile rising in his throat.
He stumbled
through the two doors and Chuck followed. As the latter did so, he slid the magazine from the gun, pulled back the slide and ejected an unspent round from the chamber. Placing the round in the top of the magazine, he slapped it back into place in the gun. It was all done with the unconscious ease that came with practice.
Muz watched him warily. Though Chuck’s story might explain why he had the handgun, it did not explain his fluid proficiency in using it and the casual comfort with which he held it. Also, Muz didn’t know much at all about firearms
, but what he did know, was that the Metropolitan police firearms trained officers carried Glocks. He had seen enough officers with the weapons strapped to their thighs to be reasonably sure that the gun Chuck was carrying was not police issue.
They wasted little time in leaving the nick, barely speaking among themselves as they did so. Nervous now of who else might be lurking in the building, they tentatively checked around every corner of each corridor and room they entered. The only slight detour they made prior to leaving was to go to the IBO office on the first floor, so that Muz could check for radio batteries. Though it was in this room that they were normally kept, the banks of chargers were completely empty. Every last battery had been taken during the exodus.
“Typical,” Muz griped.
Leaving the station via the same side door through which they had entered, Muz pressed a large red button on the exterior wall that released the lock on the pedestrian gate
, but not before carefully and protractedly checking for any movement in the street beyond.
Passing the metal police station sign, they saw wh
at remained of Inspector Bryson, her innards and brains spread across the paving.
“Well, that wasn’t here when we arrived,” Chuck said matter-of-factly and looked questioningly at Muz.
Muz simply shrugged non-committal in return, trying to avoid looking at his own handiwork.
Carl however couldn’t help but stare at the splatter in macabre fascination
, poking at it with his metal bar. Though only a portion of the woman’s head remained intact, one eye swivelled in its shattered socket to look right back at him. He actually jumped back and cried out in surprise, a shudder of revulsion flooding through him.