“How did you end up in Burnt Oak?” Muz
asked, instinctively knowing the refined-looking lady could not be from the area.
“When
the biters first came,” Margaret replied, looking back at him with teary eyes, “I spent the first night at home alone. My husband is away on business, you see. I watched the horrible events taking place outside on Sky News.
“My husband and I have a house on Totteridge Lane with a high wall surrounding the grounds, so I was quite safe. But I simply couldn’t take the sounds of people screaming out on the road… and that terrible moaning. Yesterday evening, when I saw the horses in the fi
eld at the rear of our property eating each other, I couldn’t stand being alone in the middle of all that insanity any longer.
“By then
, I knew the authorities weren’t coming to rescue me any time soon, despite their assurances over the phone, so I took the Bentley and left. I didn’t get very far at all in the car and have been making my way on foot ever since.”
“You’ve done well to survive this long on your own,” Muz told her, an element of respect in his voice.
“We’re heading north, out of London,” Amy said.
“I’m just glad Molly and Hugo went back to University last week,” Margaret said, fresh tears spilling down her sagging cheeks. “They have their whole lives ahead of them.”
“Yeah, well, so do we,” Muz responded. “We’ve just got to get out of this hell hole first.”
Margaret
slipped back into inconsolable sobbing. Amy squeezed her hand, the dog walking directly at her side.
“He’s definitely taken a shine to you,” Muz said, trying to take everyone’s focus off the older woman, so she didn’t feel as though she was being scrutinised.
“I love dogs,” Amy said. “When my boyfriend and I finally get a deposit together for a house, I want to get a Beagle…” Amy trailed off and she too began to cry now, partly in sympathy for Margaret and partly with the realisation that all her dreams may no longer have any meaning.
“So, what’s the dog called?” Muz asked her quickly.
“There’s no name tag,” Amy replied, wiping away her tears.
“Well, if you’re going to keep him, you’re going to have to give him a name,” Muz told her.
“How about Cujo?” Carl chipped in.
Muz shot him a glare but he seemed oblivious
, as he avidly tried to come up with a macho name for such a big animal.
“
Or Cerberus?” he added.
“Cerber-what?” Chuck asked.
“Cerberus,” Carl reiterated. “You know, the hell hound, the guardian of the gates of Hades.”
Chuck looked back at him dumbly.
“What about Digby?” Margaret asked in little more than a whisper.
“What’s Digby?” Carl asked her.
“The Disney film from the nineteen seventies,” Margaret informed him. “‘Digby, The Biggest Dog in the World’.”
“Digby’s a good name,” Amy decided, smiling warmly at Margaret.
Carl looked as though he might be about to sulk, but just then, Chuck fell foul of another coughing fit. He almost collapsed to his knees as he doubled over, simultaneously trying to bring up the fluid in his lungs and delving in his rucksack for a packet of cigarettes.
“That sounds quite bad. Are you okay?” Amy asked him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Chuck replied as best he could. “It’s just the cold air. I’ll have a fag and I’ll be okay.”
Amy continued to watch him, as he choked up moist lumps into a maroon-stained hanky, listening to the deep wet burbling sound his lungs made as he coughed.
“Anybody want one?” Chuck asked, holding the pack out, causing most of the group to recoil in revulsion.
“Yeah, why not?” Amy responded, taking a cigarette. She was only an occasional social smoker
, but right now she needed something to calm her nerves.
Pressing on, up ahead, Muz saw the drab grey blocks of Edgware Community Hospital whose mental health wards were situated directly beside the tube line. Muz had been unfortunate enough to be called out to those wards on many occasions.
Sectioned patients were accommodated there while undergoing treatment, patients who were considered too much of a risk to themselves or others to be allowed to interact with the public.
And yet, despite this, their care staff and the security personnel at the hospital allowed them to freely wander in and out of the buildings and around the grounds.
If a patient decided to leave the facility altogether, wandering out into the neighbouring streets, it was hospital policy that they were not to be physically challenged. This had always left the question begging in Muz’s mind as to what the actual purpose of the security officers was. All the staff did when a patient disappeared and failed to return after a few hours was call the police, passing over the problem and expecting them to spend numerous man-hours searching for them. It was an absurd set-up and Muz resented it every time he was called there.
He hated being in the wards, taking a report with all those crazy people staggering about the place.
The patients with their various mental conditions would gather in the corridors to watch him, his police uniform drawing them to him and serving to spark into life their deluded fantasies. As they looked him up and down with their wild eyes, not knowing why each of them were there and whether or not they had violent tendencies, caused himself to teeter on the edge of paranoia.
As a police officer, after a while a person
learned to deal with confrontation and violence. You became detached from it, a little blasé, and the fear of being in a dangerous situation fell away to a large degree.
For Muz however, this had never been the case when dealing with the mentally ill. Even
now, they scared the living crap out of him. The simple fact of the matter was that you could not predict how they were going to behave. A patient might be talking to him pleasantly and lucidly one moment, then the next they could suddenly and without any logical cause launch into a frenzied attack. And fighting a person who was suffering delusions was no easy task. They seemed to possess an inhuman strength, stemming from the fear of whatever craziness was happening to them in their minds.
Right now though, Muz would have quite happily gone into one of those wards for a cup of tea and a lengthy chat with the residents. Those poor pe
ople seemed positively amiable compared to the insane cannibals currently running wild in the streets.
“Shit,” Chuck suddenly said out of the blue and stopped in his tracks.
The others looked past him and saw, a little way ahead of them, a man on their side of the fence. He was a stocky man with a shaved head, wearing a once-white but now filthy vest, jeans and heavy work boots. At first, judging by his weaving walk, Chuck thought him to be a zombie. As he staggered along however, barely managing to stay on his feet, the man was carrying a bottle of vodka in one hand and a hammer in the other. No zombie Chuck had seen so far carried weapons.
“Hey,” Chuck shouted to get the man’s attention while remaining a reasonably safe distance from him.
The stocky man with the broad shoulders stopped walking, and spinning on his heels to face them, almost fell over. He stood almost motionless for a while, swaying a little and blinking repeatedly in an effort to focus his eyes on the group. He then lifted the hammer above his head, bellowed a challenging cry at the top of his lungs and came running back down the side of the track at them.
Carl turned and took off on his heels. Amy grabbed Digby by his collar and held onto Margaret. Chuck raised his candlestick in readiness and watched the drunk man lunging headlong, waiting for the right moment to bring him down.
“Stop!” Muz called out at the onrushing man. “Stop. We’re not like the others.”
“Twoja stara ciagnie psu,” the man yelled in Polish in response.
The copper put himself between Chuck and the intoxicated maniac to prevent the black man from taking his head off. As he reached them, the drunk swung at Muz’s head with the hammer, but he saw it coming and easily ducked the blow. Having completely overextended his balance, the drunk tumbled forward head first into the stone chips.
“Calm down,” Muz shouted loudly enough to penetrate the man’s drunken stupor.
The man, who had the heavy brow and broad features of someone of eastern European origin, panted heavily, looking up at the people around him. Suddenly, he burst into laughter.
“You scare me,” he said, still laughing.
Muz bent over, grabbed the heavy man by an arm and pulled him back up onto his feet. He stunk of vodka and stale sweat.
“Dziekuje,” he said in thanks.
“Do you speak English?” Muz asked him.
“Tak… Yes,” the drunk man replied. “You try to escape London also?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I fight my w
ay here from Cricklewood,” the Polish man announced proudly.
“This has spread as far south as Cricklewood?” Muz asked in despair.
Still a little out of breath, the man nodded.
“Shit,” Muz sighed, feeling his moral sink even further, then saw the two women looking at him with fearful eyes. “At least we’re heading in the right direction. We should be safe enough when we get past Edgware and out into the fields of Hertfordshire,” he told them, trying to give them an element of hope he himself didn’t feel.
He had to admire the stocky pole though, having fought his way all this way north. It was a great deal farther than Muz had managed to travel.
The P
olish man stooped precariously and picked up his hammer and the bottle of vodka from where he had dropped them. Examining the latter, he saw that the contents had spilled out. “Cholera,” he cursed.
It was undoubtedly for the best, Muz and the others concluded, as the man launched the bottle into the bushes. He had clearly had more than enough to drink already.
“I am need to piss now,” the man declared, whipping out his penis without slightest concern for the women present and strode off over to the fence. “Ah, is good,” he sighed as he released the muscles of his bladder.
In the grounds of the hospital, people had begun to emerge, drawn towards the train tracks by the sounds of t
he commotion there. Seeing the Polish male by the fence, they came lurching, crawling and sprinting over, slamming into the mesh barrier as they attempted to get at him. Showing no fear, the urinating man leant back and arced his stream at them.
“You like this?” He mocked the cannibals as he drenched them, pissing directly into the open mouth of one half-eaten man who was gnashing his teeth in a vain effort to bite off his cock. “Is good?”
“Will someone please stop him?” Amy implored, deeply offended by the man’s actions, as Margaret covered her own eyes.
“Just leave him to it,” Chuck said.
“Yeah, I for one do not want to piss him off,” Muz added.
“
I have a little bit more,” the Polish man slurred happily, squeezing out the last few squirts. “Okay, is enough for you. No more. Go away.”
Turning back to the group, he gave his member a good shake and put it back in his pants.
While the others were distracted by all this, Carl came skulking back up the side of the track and slipped back in at the rear of the group, hoping that his cowardice had gone unnoticed.
“I ready now,” the drunk man said. “We go?”
The number of madmen gathering on the other side of the fence continued to grow however, people racing over from every corner of the sprawling grounds, and they literally began to pile up. Some of those at the very front of the crowd, clawed and pushed by those behind them, lost their footing. As they fell to the ground, others trampled them, using them to stand on in an effort to reach the top of the fence. The pile-up continued until some of the massing numbers were able to reach up and grab the barbed wire coils. As the rusting spikes sliced deep into the flesh of their palms and fingers, not a drop of blood was drawn.
“This doesn’t look good,” Muz said nervously.
It was as he spoke that one of the loping quadrupeds at the rear of the gathering groaning crowd took a run up and climbed the mass of densely packed bodies. The deformed man, more animal than human now, attempted to stand upright, pushing his torso up with his arms. He emitted a series of violent sounds that could only be called barking, slumping forward again onto all fours, atop the shoulders of the writhing mass of people supporting him. Then, as every member of the little band of survivors feared, he launched himself over the fence.
Digby barked furiously
at him as he landed in the gravel but backed away from the danger. He had probably been a great domestic guard dog and pet, but an attack dog he certainly was not. It was probably due to this that he had survived so long; running from these madmen, as opposed to attacking, was by far the more sensible option even for a dog like him.
On the ball,
Chuck ran at the man and managed to get in a good head shot with his candlestick before the poor crazed psycho, who had landed in a heap, could regain his hand and footing on the loose stones. Chuck, Muz and Carl then closed in, as the cannibal was still shaking the pain from his head. Together they stomped on him mercilessly, concentrating on his head and neck, until the man stopped moving.