Muz couldn’t have even guessed how long he had been asleep before he woke on hearing someone moving around in the flat. Not daring to flinch in his seat, he strained his eyes to make sense of the vague shapes in the darkened room. After a few seconds, he was able to make out the unmistakable form of a person standing there, motionless in the dark, not more than four feet from him.
“Muz?” Amy whispered.
“Jesus, Amy,” Muz said, exhaling the breath he had been holding in his lungs.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you,” the little woman apologised. “I just needed
to get a glass of water from the kitchen.”
“It’s
okay,” Muz told her.
Amy began to walk back to her bedroom but then stopped in her tracks.
“Muz?”
“Mmm?”
“Why are those people decaying?” Amy asked.
“You, of all people, are asking me?” Muz asked her back.
“As ridiculous as it is, let’s just say for a moment that Chuck is right and they are all the living dead,” Amy speculated. “They still shouldn’t be exhibiting signs of putrefaction yet. It’s only been three days since this began.”
“Only,” Muz butted in.
“Even in the height of summer,” Amy went on, “a dead person wouldn’t decay so fast.”
“I can’t help you,” Muz told her. “Nothing about all that has happened makes any sense. I wish I had even half the answers to all the questions filling my head.”
“Okay. Night, Muz,” Amy sighed sadly.
“Night, Amy. Try not to think too much about it tonight.”
Amy tiptoed off to the bedroom, trying not to wake anyone else, leaving Muz to stare into the dark and hope for sleep again.
What must have been an hour later, long after the copper and the paramedic had found the peace of slumber once more, Margaret found herself woken by a noise. She could barely make out the muted sounds of low moaning, broken intermittently by deep sniffs. The dog too had heard it, his head lifting with pricked ears, to stare at the closed bedroom door from his position on the floor.
Margaret swung her feet down to the carpet and got out of the shared bed, doing her best not to disturb Amy. Opening the door, she stood for a moment, listening to the night. She could hear what she presumed were the competing rasping lungs of both Tom and Chuck in the living room. Beneath those sounds though, she could still make out the quiet moaning. It was coming from the other bedroom.
Daring to open the door to that room, she leaned in and peered at the still scene, poorly lit by a dull moon. She could just discern the shapes of Carl and Jay in the bed and it was evident now that the sounds were coming from the boy. He was sobbing and sniffing into his pillow, none of which seemed to have disturbed the man beside him in the slightest.
As she walked across to where he lay, Jay lifted his head from where he had buried it, in order to regard her.
“Shhh,” Margaret said
, and without another sound, climbed into the bed beside him. She pulled the boy in close for a hug, cradling his head in her arms and stroking his hair.
“It’s okay,” Margaret whispered faintly.
“No, it’s not,” Jay blubbered back. “Mum didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Not one of these people, from what he had heard from their stories, had been through what he had. None of them had been forced to kill a loved one.
Knowing that the boy was right and things were definitely not okay, Margaret could think of nothing more to say to him. Instead, she just held him and eventually they fell asleep in the warmth of each other’s arms.
Chapter 11
Cheeseburger
& Captain Chijioke
Early the following morning, Muz woke with a sudden start to an awful sound from the balcony beyond the window, just to the right of where he was sat. Sitting bolt upright to look outside, he saw a raven perched on the handrail. The bird cawed loudly again, looking back at him. Muz sat motionless with the fear that it might be infected. The bird however, simply regarded him with a quizzical sideways stare, blinking a beady eye. Then it spread its wings and took off. Muz grimaced grumpily, as he stretched out his limbs and rubbed at the crick in his neck.
Carl wasn’t normally a light sleeper but
he was the next to stir into life, having heard Muz beginning to move around. He found he had been sleeping with an arm and a leg hanging out the side of the bed. He had been pushed almost over the edge by Jay and Margaret, whom he was more than a little surprised to see under the covers with them.
Nature called and he got up, heading along the short hallway to the bathroom. As he passed the door to the other bedroom, he saw that it was ajar and glanced inside. The dog was sprawled out on that bed, taking up most of it, with the still sleeping Amy cuddled up against him.
“Looks like that bloody thing had a better night than me,” Carl grumbled to himself.
Jay woke before Margaret, instantly feeling embarrassed that he could hear others already awake and
that they might have seen him sleeping in the woman’s arms. Trying not to wake her, he slipped out from her embrace.
“Molly,” he heard Margaret mumble softly as she began to stir.
Soon the others were up and about and they all again took turns to use the bathroom. Chuck picked out a can from one of the piles and prepared himself a simple breakfast. Eating his meatballs in gravy straight from the saucepan he had warmed them in, he stepped out onto the balcony, finding Muz already leant against the handrail.
“Alright?” Muz asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” Chuck replied, looking out at the northwest cordon line amid the fields.
The big man had a pair of binoculars, stolen with remarkable foresight from the shop on Watling Avenue, hanging round his neck. Using his free hand, he lifted them to his eyes.
“Is there any change in the military line from yesterday?” Muz asked.
“No,” Chuck replied.
“Nothing of interest at all?”
“No, nothing.”
“What about those helicopters?” Muz asked, pointing at the airborne choppers that were following the line of the cordon a half mile to the other side of it.
“They’re Press,” Chuck told him.
“They don’t seem to want to come any closer today,” Muz remarked, watching the aircrafts’ flight paths.
“Maybe this has finally been declared a no fly zone,” Chuck speculated, putting down the saucepan and lighting up a cigarette.
Stepping out to the right edge of the balcony and leaning out to look in a more southerly direction around the corner of the block, Muz was just able to see central London. Off in the far distance, almost hidden by the horizon and the misty haze, he was just able to make out the tops of Centre Point and The Gherkin. Had all this horror spread as far south as that, he wondered.
His eyes then scanned down to
the ground directly beneath them. The grass and pathway outside the main entrance were still strewn with the bodies of the people they had killed. Atop them there danced a flock black ravens, feasting on the cadavers. Muz could just about pick out from this height three or four arms and legs still twitching amid the piles of corpses.
“Look down there,” he said to Chuck. “Looks like those cows weren’t hungry after all.”
“Guess so,” Chuck responded, pulling more nicotine into his lungs. “We’re going to have to burn them. It’s the only way to make sure they’re completely dead and stop them spreading disease.”
Muz nodded at
the wisdom of what he said but grimaced at the thought of it.
When Chuck had finished his fag and flicked the butt into the air, they went back inside and told the others what they needed to do.
“We can raid a few more flats on the way down,” Chuck said. He didn’t add that it was with the prime purpose of finding better quality cigarettes. “And when we’ve finished burning the bodies, we should find something to barricade that front door.”
“I think you three should st
ay here,” Muz told the two women and the youth.
Margaret raised her eyebrows, snatched up her hatchet
, and strode for the door.
“You jokin’, cuz?” Jay replied, thrusting out his chest and following the woman.
Amy stared down the hallway at the iron gate of the door. She really didn’t relish the idea of leaving the safety of the flat, but she didn’t want to remain here alone either. Reluctantly, she too headed for the door and patted her thigh at the dog. Digby lurched into life, shuffling in an ungainly manner up onto his feet.
Muz sighed
in resignation.
“Where you going with that?” Chuck asked, on seeing Carl sling the assault rifle over his shoulder. “You know the thing’s empty.”
“I’ll just feel safer carrying it,” Carl responded.
Chuck shook his head.
The group had already raided two more flats on their descent but it was when they kicked in a door on the sixth floor that they got their first surprise. As the door swung in and slammed against the wall, the stench that was released hit them in the face. It was a stink of decaying death so strong that the group could instantly taste a film of it on the roofs of their mouths.
“Oh my G..
.,” Carl choked before vomiting a little in his mouth and swallowing it back down.
“No way I’m going in there,” Jay declared adamantly.
“We can’t afford not to,” Chuck told him, talking to the boy directly for the first time since they had met.
The blood had completely drained from Tom’s face and he remained out in the stairwell, as far from the open door as possible, with Margaret rubbing his back. Covering his nose
and mouth with the neck of his T-shirt, Chuck stepped through the door, as did Muz. Using the copper as a shield, Amy took up the rear.
Amid the musty squalor of the flat, they found the source of the smell. In the dingy living room, there sat
side by side and holding hands on a sofa the completely motionless corpses of a man and a woman. Both were so bloated that it looked as though, if they hadn’t died as a result of the bite wounds to their necks, they would have soon died of morbid obesity anyway.
Ten or more flies, having been crawling over the bodies, buzzed as they took to
the air and circled the light shade on the ceiling.
“Be careful,” Chuck warned the others. “We don’t know how dead they are.”
The dead man’s skin was a deep brown and he looked as though he had middle Asian origins. The photos of both him and the woman on the mantelpiece showed otherwise however. The happy couple in those pictures were barely recognisable as the same people, save by the bone structures of their faces and the shape of their noses.
“He’s a white man,” Muz stated, his voice muffled against the sleeve of his shirt.
“And they were both skinny,” Amy added, also looking at the recent images.
Of the three of them, she was the least affected by the overwhelming rank stench. In fact, she seemed barely
to even notice it. She stepped forward to get a closer look at the bodies.
Though the man remained completely motionless, the dead woman now exhibited some semblance of life. Her eyes peeled open, releasing a snotty puss from beneath the lids
, and she watched the three figures in front of her with a predatory stare.
“Come away,” Muz told the paramedic.
As he did so however, the decomposing woman reached out at Amy, her fingers clawing for her face. Falling short of her target, the woman tried to lean forward. It was her first show of animation since she had succumbed to her injuries three days ago. The sudden movement caused her badly swollen gut to burst open and its liquefied contents sloshed over the carpet at her feet. The reeking odour the human soup gave off was even stronger than the previous fetid smell.
Carl, who had only just got control of himself and had dared to join the three in the flat, stepped through the door to the living room, vomited and rapidly staggered back out.
Chuck too could bear no more and lurched out after him. Amy though, still seemed for the most part unfazed and continued to warily observe the bodies. Muz, despite his utter revulsion, refused to leave the woman alone and forced himself to tolerate the smell.
The decaying woman, now an exploded mess of organs and weakly flapping limbs, seemed to be of little threat, Amy assessed, as she stepped even closer to observe the dead man.
“Why is he not showing any signs of life like all the others?” Amy asked rhetorically.
“Yeah, that guy is
, like, for real dead,” Jay said from the doorway, his curiosity at what all the fuss was about having got the better of him.
“I’ve seen this before. You must have too,” Muz said to Amy. “As the cells of the body break down and liquefy, they give off gases, causing the body to swell up like a balloon.”
“Sulphur dioxide,” Amy specified.
“I went to a sudden death once,” Muz continued, “where this old girl had been dead so long that she had burst and melted right into the carpet.”
“For real?” Jay asked, gulping down bile and trying not to look disturbed.
“You must
really enjoy your work, Mustafa,” Margaret remarked, having also entered, so as not to come across as weak. She was using a tea towel she had purloined from one of the other flats to cover her face.
“Tell me about it,” Muz said solemnly.
“That old lady had been dead over a month before we found her though. The weird thing is these two are only a few days old.”
Finding little of worth in the flat, the group re-emerged into the stairwell.
“You all smell very bad,” Tom told them in a huge understatement, keeping his distance. The stink of death had sunk into the fibres of their clothes and they couldn’t leave it behind.
Searching more flats, they discovered nothing else untoward. Both Muz and Carl chose to discard their spike and knife, which were prone to getting stuck in meat, in favour of blunt concussive weapons. Muz found a small but weighty lump hammer in a tool box. It was not too heavy to swing repeatedly
, but would certainly inflict a lot of damage. Carl found himself a cricket bat, which had the unfortunate effect of causing him to recount numerable anecdotes of him playing for Berkhamstead when he was younger.
In the flats on the ground floor, they found a heavy wooden wardrobe and other large items of furniture. Under Chuck’s instruction, they struggled together to drag
them out into the communal hallway and line them up by the door, ready to use as a barricade upon their return.
As they stepped outside into the cheerful brilliant light of the day,
they disturbed the ravens, which as one lifted into the air, crying out dryly and circling above. With a raucous buzzing, a swarm of thousands of flies also took flight, leaving their eggs in the wounds of the dead.
The group checked all around themselves nervously, looking for any signs of movement from the other blocks or down the road in either direction. The air was still and silent, offering no sounds as warning of an impending attack.
“Okay,” Chuck said, putting on a pair of gloves he had found. “Drag them all into one big pile. Jay, you go do what I told you.”
Happy to be useful, the youth ran over to the nearest abandoned car and prised open the fuel cap with a large screwdriver. He then uncoiled a length of plastic hosing that Chuck had ripped out of the air filtration system of a tropical aquarium.
Feeding one end of the hose into the car’s petrol tank, he sucked on the other. When he saw the fluid starting to run through the clear pipe, he placed it in the bucket he had been carrying and let it fill up.
“Looks like the cows haven’t completely ignored these bodies after all,” Muz said.
“How do you know?” Chuck asked.
“T
hat naked girl’s gone. So are the few others that were still fresh,” the copper told him.
“Seems they don’t like rotting meat,” Carl hazarded a guess.
“Be careful with that,” Muz told Jay, as he came over, the contents of the bucket splashing at his side.
Chuck took the bucket and liberally splashed the pile of
bodies with the petrol.
“You want to do it?” he then asked Jay, offering the youth his box of matches.
“Nah, man. I’ll let you, innit,” Jay replied, backing away.
Chuck smiled, lit three of the matches and tossed them at the dead.
The pile caught instantly alight and the heady odour of burning hair and skin fil
led the air. As the raging flames consumed the pyre, limbs amid the pile began to twitch with renewed vigour. A few of the corpses hissed and wailed in pain. The flames began to crackle and spit and it wasn’t long before trails of hot liquid fat were trickling from the bonfire, snaking their way to the gutter at the side of the road.