After taking
far too long wondering as to how he might fight this thing, Muz remembered the Taser and drew it from one of his pockets. He flicked the safety lever on the side of the bright yellow weapon and aimed the little red laser dot at the centre of the quivering mass on the sofa. Pulling the trigger caused two barbed prongs to be ejected with projectile force. Still attached to the Taser by uncoiling copper wires, they buried themselves deep in the gooey lump.
The weapon was designed to conduct an electric current through the gap between the two probes, creating what the Met Police called ‘neuro-muscular compliance’.
Simply put, that meant it sent so many volts through a person’s muscles and nervous system that the muscles locked up tight, preventing them from moving.
Although the jellified mess in front of Muz no longer had any muscles, it did still possess a nervous system. As a result of the overwhelming voltage, the tendril first tightened even more around Carl’s neck
, then when the electricity automatically stopped arcing, it went limp. Still pulling on Carl’s ankles, Chuck and Tom fell backwards, pulling the man free of the blob of rotting jelly.
Not wishing to face the prospect of taking another massive jolt of electricity, the mucus mass oozed up onto the backrest
of the sofa, still keeping hold of its dead wife. It slithered slowly, as though it were actually attempting to be stealthy.
“Look out,” Amy yelled.
Muz rapidly fumbled with the Taser, finding the catches to release the spent cartridge that was still connected, via the wires, to the probes embedded in the undead lump.
The mass of jelly, instead of attempting another attack though, pressed itself against the window behind the sofa. Its furiously flicking tendril beat against the glass until it shattered and the
lump slumped out onto the balcony, dragging the dead woman with it. From there, using its wet tentacle, it pulled itself up onto the handrail and slid over the other side. The last thing the people in the flat saw were the fluffy slippers on the dead woman’s feet come flying off, as her legs flicked over the edge.
Carl was still kicking and thrashing around on the living room floor, huge blisters swelling and bursting on his badly crushed neck. Muz dropped down and used his bodyweight to pin the man’s legs. Tom and
Chuck held his arms, immobilising him, so that he couldn’t cause himself any more harm than he had already suffered. Amy knelt at Carl’s side, holding his head and examining the grievous wounds to his throat.
“What can I do?” Jay asked frantically, pacing up and down in agitation.
“Get me a bowl of water,” Amy barked at him through her tears, “and some linen.”
Jay ran out of the room.
Carl’s dramatically laboured rasping breaths caused bloody foam to form in the corners of his mouth. More blood spattered from a small open wound underneath his Adam’s apple each time he exhaled.
“Lucy,” he managed to whisper weakly.
“His trachea is crushed,” Amy announced, tears and snot dribbling over her lips. She placed her head against his chest, listening. “I think his lungs are filled with that acid.”
Carl juddered violently and it was all the three men could do to hold him down. Every muscle in his body locked up for a moment and then he went limp. A last gargled breath escaped his lungs.
“No,” Amy begged, her head still pressed against Carl’s unmoving ribs. She had heard the last beat of his heart. She wrapped her arms around the man’s torso and hugged him tight. “No.”
Tom, Chuck and Muz looked
at one another and released Carl’s limbs.
“I’ve got the…” Jay began to say, rushing back into the room, with a washing up bowl in his hands. “Aw shit.”
“What the fuck?” Muz said. “I mean, seriously, what the fuck?”
They stared down at Carl’s dead body, unable to comprehend or accept what had just happened. Muz took Amy by both shoulders and pulled her away from the body, helping her to her feet. She leant into his chest and snivelled against his stab vest.
“Get some blankets,” Chuck said to Jay.
The youth, glad of the excuse to leave the room, did as he was told. While he was gone, Chuck set about looking down the back of the sofa and behind the DVD shelves and other items of furniture. He found two white electrical extension leads and unplugged them. When young Jay
returned, the men laid the blankets out on the floor. Lifting Carl’s flaccid form between them, they placed him in the middle and wrapped him up. Chuck then used the electrical leads to bind the shroud in place around the body. Amy had to walk out of the flat, unable to watch.
“Help me,” were the only words the black man could force past the lump in his throat
, as he then tried to lift the dead weight.
Tom came to his aid, taking the legs. Together they carried the man, who had become a friend of sorts, out into the stairwell where Amy was waiting. In silence, save for the sounds of Amy’s whimpering, the procession made their way down the stairs to the ground floor. Here, the solemn reverence was broken by the shrill squealing sounds of the larger men dragging the heavy furniture across the floor, out of the way of the main door.
Outside, they gently placed the bundle of blankets beside the pile of already blackened skeletons. Tom removed the tape and the rag from the bottleneck of one of his special cocktails. He took a long swig from the bottle’s contents.
“
W śmierci znajdujemy pokój,” he called out, lifting the bottle high.
As the Pole began to dowse the sheets in vodka, Carl began to struggle against his bindings.
“Oh my God, he’s not dead,” Amy declared, her eyes full of hope.
“Yes, he is,” Chuck told her firmly. “He’s starting to turn.”
Amy ran forward to where the bundle was squirming on the grass. Muz tried to stop her but she shrugged him off and hit him in the chest with a fist. She knelt beside the bound man and hurriedly pulled a coil of the plastic-coated wire up over his head. She then unraveled the blanket at one end, revealing Carl’s face.
The man, the top his head bald, blistered and bloody, looked back at her with crazed
eyes. He fought even more wildly against his cocoon now and his teeth snapped at the woman viciously. In his rage and hunger, he bit off the tip of his tongue and it fell to the ground, twitching. Though Amy recoiled in terror, Carl barely even reacted to the incredible pain it caused him.
Muz took Amy’s upper arm and, as gently as he could, pulled her away, nodding at Chuck as he did so. The big man stepped forward and tossed a match at the blankets.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The match’s meager flame spread dramatically over the entirety of the alcohol-drenched covers. Carl writhed with all his strength against the searing agony. His e
xtended scream sounded inhuman. Emerging from his splintered larynx, it was more akin to the calls of the many ravens still gathering here.
“
Oh please, make it stop,” Amy begged Muz, in response to the terrible cry.
“This is the best we can do for him,” the copper told her.
The horrible sound eventually dwindled and died in Carl’s throat and he ceased his thrashing. No one spoke as they continued to watch him burn, making sure he was completely dead. Jay felt something chilly touch him gently on the forehead and he looked up to see fine snowflakes beginning to tumble from the billowing grey clouds above.
Only when they were thoroughly sure that Carl had cooked through and was out of his misery, did they turn and head back into the block. They had left their flat this morning intending to burn two corpses. None of them could have guessed that the one they would end up burning would be that of one of their own.
Making their way slowly back up to the top floor, they found both the door and the bars of their flat stood ajar. The strong odor of cooking bacon came from within.
“Margaret?” Muz called out, as he entered. “Hello?”
There was no response. Muz stopped in his tracks and everyone was suddenly on their guard.
“Margaret?” Jay shouted past the men in front of him.
Still nothing.
“Search the rooms,” Chuck told the others, stepping forward with his candlestick held high.
The group looked everywhere in the flat and on the balcony, even under the beds and in the cupboards. There was no sign of either the woman or the dog.
“There’s blood and broken glass on the floor in the kitchen,” Jay told the others nervously
, as they regrouped in the living room.
“Oh God, no,” Amy blubbered.
As one, they went to look at what Jay had found. Margaret had clearly started to prepare breakfast, as she had said she would. Several sausages and strips of bacon were still sizzling slightly in a frying pan, though the gas had been turned off. What worried those observing the scene though, was the thick red puddle coating the lino floor and splashed up the cabinet doors. Shards of broken glass lay in the pool and a sticky red handprint was smeared against one of the walls.
Tom stepped into the kitchen and dropped to his haunches. He stuck a finger in the puddle then lifted it up to his face, rubbing the sample between his forefinger and thumb. Then he licked it.
“Oh good, you’re back,” Margaret said from behind them, causing them all to leap with fright.
They turned to see the elderly lady holding Digby by his collar.
Her hands and clothing were smeared with the same sticky red fluid that was in the kitchen.
“You’re covered in blood,” Amy gasped with concern.
“What? Oh, no,” the woman told her. “It’s pasta sauce.”
“Where have you been?” Chuck demanded.
“I swear this beast has come straight from the fires of hell,” Margaret replied, nodding down at Digby and jerking his collar. “Firstly, he jumped up onto the kitchen worktop and tried to lick at a jar of sauce I’d taken out of a cupboard to get at the beaked beans. All he managed to achieve for his effort was to knock it to the floor. I tried to clean up the pieces of glass but slipped in the sauce. Then he escaped. Don’t ask me how he managed to get out past the cage, but he’s clearly a damned site smarter than he looks. He was in a flat on the tenth floor, with his head in a fridge by the time I caught up with him.”
When Margaret finished her rant, the others just looked at her with haunted expressions.
“What’s wrong?” Margaret asked.
“Carl’s dead,” Muz said flatly.
“Oh, dear Lord,” Margaret gasped. “But how?”
The woman’s eyes began to tear up
and her chin was trembling, as she looked from person to person. First Amy, then Jay, stepped forward and hugged her tight.
None of them felt like eating for a long time after that. The sausages and bacon went cold and were eventually fed to the very grateful Digby.
They spent the rest of the drab day milling around aimlessly in the flat, no one quite knowing what to do with themselves. Muz found he was unable to bear the news channel any longer. He flicked through the assortment of other channels repeatedly, staring blankly at whatever programmes he came across, anything to distract himself from his thoughts. Though the others were gathered around him, on the sofa, chairs and the floor, as introverted as they had become, they may as well have each been a thousand miles apart. Tom wasn’t the only one to start drinking early and, as a group, it wasn’t long before they had put a large dent in his stash.
Muz watched Chuck get up and step out onto the balcony. He too clambered to his feet and went out after him. He and the others had given the so
ldier a harder time than he deserved. The man had been through a hell of a lot, just as they all had, and he had just been trying to make the best of a bad hand.
“Hey,” Muz said.
Chuck looked at him a little suspiciously but nodded back before returning his gaze to watch the distant cordon line out over the fields.
“That was some weird shit today,” Muz said, trying to start a conversation.
“Yeah.”
“What the hell was that thing?” Muz asked a little too earnestly.
He had thought reality had collapsed around him when he had first been faced with people who he was coming dangerously close to admitting were zombies. But now? Now things were really taking a turn towards the surreal.
“Don’t have a clue,” Chuck replied.
Muz nodded. He hadn’t really expected any other answer.
“Just as things were starting to get a little easier,” Chuck then said, shaking his head. “Just as the zombies were starting to get weaker,
slower, too rotten to chase us… now we’ve got a man-eating blob on the loose.”
Chapter 13
Silent Sam
Days six and seven passed without event, due to none of the survivors daring to leave the flat, save for the necessity of allowing Digby out onto the grass for a couple of minutes a few times a day.
Though Muz and the others had only known Carl a matter of days, the flat seemed oddly empty without him. Without his poorly thought out comments and cutting sense of humour that had been so annoying at the time, conversation was now stilted among those who remained.
Spending many of the hollow hours that passed standing out on the balcony, Muz and Chuck saw that the afflicted that passed by below were definitely growing older and staler. It wasn’t just their physical abilities that suffered as a result of their rotting. Their already limited mental capacities were diminishing further too. No longer was it only those poor people who had the muscles of their buttocks eaten that walked on all fours now. Some of those who, until now had managed to remain upright, were also creeping around like dogs. Their brains were shrivelling and rotting so badly that they could no longer coordinate themselves enough to stay up on two feet.
It wasn’t just humans wandering down on the streets now. The spread of the engineered amoeboid cells that had affected so many had truly flourished, taking hold of all mammalian life. The animated corpses of numerous species could be seen scurrying around, hunting and fighting each other for whatever scraps of cadaver they could find. Some, having managed to hide for several days, were still freshly infected. Incredibly fast and strong, the ferocity with which they fought was unnerving. Even with the armoured Jankel for protection, leaving the block for any reason no longer seemed a good idea.
With the meagre rations they had found in the tower already running low, this was becoming a concern for the group.
Still finding the need to make light of the situation as best as they could, Muz and Chuck had taken to making a game out of what they saw, acquiring points for each new infected species they managed to spot.
“I’ve got seven points,” Chuck protested. “I was the first to see the hedgehogs, the rats, the mice, the polecat…”
“That wasn’t a polecat,” Muz told him. “It was just another rat.”
“It was a polecat. It had a furry tail. Who had the binoculars?” Chuck said, refusing to relinquish the point. “I saw the rabbit…”
“That crazy rabbit,” Muz said. “Who would have thought something so small and cute could do that to a grown man?”
“Yeah,” Chuck agreed before going silent, trying to remember the other animal’s he had spotted. “What about that vole? Who gets that?”
“That one belongs to Carl,” Muz said solemnly.
“I guess so,” Chuck nodded.
They both then sunk into a spontaneous mournful silence.
“Why isn’t this affecting the birds?” Muz asked after a while. “We’ve seen more and more ravens turning up every day to feed on the dead, but none of them have turned. Not one.”
“And you’re moaning about that?”
“Of course not,” Muz replied.
“This thing, whatever it is, clearly only affects mammals,” Chuck said. “And we should be bloody thankful for it.”
Though the hordes of afflicted seemed to have stopped eating each other for a while, since they had first started to rot, now through utter desperation, they were at it again. With so few survivors left for them to prey upon and the chances of them catching fresh meat again negligible, many were turning on each other once more. The decomposing tissues offered little nutrition but it was better than nothing, when faced with a hunger that burned like white-hot fire.
Some had even taken to biting the gamey flesh from their own bodies, their need for sustenance driving them to acts of self-mutilation. They tore with their teeth at the skin of their own fingers and hands, devoured great lumps of the muscle of their forearms, until their bones were exposed all the way up to their elbows. Many of the crazed victims
chewed off their own lips, tore off their earlobes and ripped away their eyelids, so desperate were they for even such tiny morsels of meat. The lipless chattering teeth and the lidless staring eyes made the afflicted look even more menacing and horrific than they already had.
“Why won’t they just fucking die?” Muz asked, though a
t that time he was standing alone on the balcony, Chuck having gone back inside to get himself some food.
Still, at least there had been no further sightings of that weird jellified mass since their encounter with it in the flat on the sixth floor. That thing was dangerous – as poor Carl had found out.
Having taken as much as he could bear of the horror for the time being, Muz put down the binoculars and went inside. Amy, Margaret and Jay were all huddled under a blanket on the sofa, Digby sprawled out at their feet. Chuck and Tom could be heard in the kitchen, bickering over the meal they were preparing together.
Muz spoke of what he had seen regarding the change in the behaviour of the afflicted people out on the streets below.
“They’re walking around, bumping into cars and walls down there,” he said. “It’s as though they can’t even see them.”
“Their eyesight must be deteriorating,” Amy offered, lifting her mouth out above the top
of the blanket.
“You think?” Muz said sarcastically, immediately regretting the tone of his voice.
“If the afflicted are physically weakening to the point where they can no longer catch food,” Amy continued, ignoring his acidity, “then their eyes are going to rot, just like the rest of their bodies. If they’re bumping into things in daylight, they must be completely blind at night. If we need to go out again, we should confine our movements to after dark.”
Muz nodded in agreement, the idea of stepping foot outside of the bloc
k again filling him with fear.
The eight
h day since hell had fallen on north London found Muz and Chuck once again stood out on the north-facing balcony of their thirteenth floor flat.
“Looks like the Americans are moving in,” Chuck said absently.
“How do you know?” Muz asked.
“See that helicopter over there?” Chuck pointed out, over the fields at the fortified military compound. “It’s an American CH-53E Super Stallion.”
“Super Stallion, eh?” Muz remarked with a smile. “It’s massive.”
“Yeah, it’s American,” Chuck shrugged. “I saw those soddin’ cows again just before you came out. They’re looking almost as messed up as all the people now.”
“I still wouldn’t want to have to fight them off though,” Muz replied.
“No,” Chuck agreed.
Looking down at Lacey Drive, Muz’s vision was caught by the movement of a man staggering along the road. Just another crazy cannibal, he thought at first, but then noticed something odd about him. The copper frowned, unsure of what exactly he was seeing. It appeared that the man in the street had a large square sheet of cardboard hanging from around his neck.
“Pass me the bino’s,” he asked Chuck.
Himself still gazing out at the distant lines of razor wire, Chuck passed Muz the binoculars. The copper lifted them to his eyes and focused on the road below. He had been right. That man down there had some kind of homemade placard on his chest, held in place by a string around his neck.
“What the..
.,” Muz murmured, as he fumbled with the zoom function.
The cardboard had something written on it.
“Oh my God,” Muz gasped. “We’ve got to get down there.”
“What? Why?” Chuck
asked, but Muz was already running inside.
Not wanting to give the man in the street the opportunity to wander by, Muz ran through the living room for the front door, picking up the first weapon that came to hand, Carl’s cricket bat, as he did so.
“What’s going on?” Margaret and Jay, who were curled up on the sofa in the living room, asked in unison, immediately full of concern.
“Don’t know,” Chuck said, running after Muz.
“Unlock the door,” Muz told the big man.
“What did you see?” Chuck demanded.
“Unlock the door.”
“We can’t risk…”
“Just unlock the bloody door,” Muz shouted.
Chuck did as he was told and Muz ran for the stairwell. Chuck grabbed his gold-plated candlestick and lumbered after him.
“What the hell did you see?” Chuck panted as he tried to keep up with Muz’s rapid decent down the stairs.
“That man..
.,” Muz called back over his shoulder. “The writing…”
Raj squatted barefoot and motionless on the branch of a tree, hidden from view by the dying foliage, as he observed the scene around him. His eyes, bright and al
ert, flicked this way and that, as he watched the short chubby woman, the muscular man and the dog over by the entrance of one of the blocks. Leaning his head over to one shoulder, he stretched his neck until he heard his vertebrae crack. The sole remaining sign that he had merely a few days earlier broken his neck was a slight discoloured swelling.
Every cell of his body had long since succumbed to the amoeboid recoding, a process in him at least that had now attained its full potential. His newly formatted cells had completely succeeded in retarding and even reversing all necrosis. He felt in the best shape of his life, stronger, faster,
and more mentally tuned than he ever had. His senses too were by far the sharpest they had ever been. He felt alive.
Having followed the band of survivors to this area, he had since been hanging around the estate, watching them from a distance for days on end. As drawn to those people as he had been, he had always done his best to remain out of sight, save for that time he had felt compelled to save one of their number from being eaten. He knew that if they came across him, fearing for their lives, they would certainly turn on him, like the animals they were. Though he feared what they might do to him, he felt the controlling urge to watch over them, to protect them if he could. Why he had such strong feelings towards these complete strangers, he did not know for sure. Maybe it stemmed from guilt.
Now, however, someone else had captured his attention. He had been observing the odd man, as he shuffled through the estate, for the past half hour. The slim white man, on whom he was spying through the gaps in the canopy, was in a terrible state. His lower jaw was missing, having been torn off. When Raj had first seen him from a distance, he had thought that he had an arm missing. Seeing the shuffling stranger up close though, he could see that he in fact did have two arms. It was simply that one, almost completely obscured by his tattered shirt, was no more than ten inches long. Raj could only conclude, as miraculous as it seemed that with the original arm having been severed, a new one was growing in its place. Raj had seen nothing even remotely similar among the countless numbers of inflicted people he had come across. It was though, the writing on the card around the man’s neck that fascinated him the most.
As the
strangely deformed man shuffled towards Salisbury Court, Muz came bursting out of the main entrance with Chuck in a distant second place. The sudden commotion caused both Amy and her bodyguard, Tom, to jump with fight. Digby stopped pissing mid-stream and barked aggressively at the two men, his hackles instantly up.
“What’s wrong?” Amy called out after the men but they both ignored her.
Muz stopped in the middle of the road, just as the strange newcomer staggered from around the bend in Lacey Drive, emerging from around the corner of Stratton House. Seeing the police officer and the huge fat muscular man in front of him, the stranger stopped walking and simply stood looking back at them.
“Knife,” Chuck called out, alerting the others to the fact that the zombie standing in front of him was carrying a blade in his only hand. The fact that this was the first of all the undead he had seen to carry a weapon did not even cross his mind.
The situation remained frozen for several minutes, the strange man standing in the road, regarding Muz and Chuck, Amy holding onto Digby’s collar by the block, while Tom held onto her shoulder, preventing her from walking over to the stand-off.
“What does that say?” Chuck asked, at long last taking note of the writing on the piece of card around the man’s neck.
The words, written in blood with all the skill of a young child, read ‘I’m Alive. Please Don’t Kill Me!’
“What the hell is that all about?” Chuck asked, his inability to make sense of the situation only making him more nervous.
“He… I don’t know… He must be different,” Muz replied.
“Different, my arse,” Chuck spat back. “It’s infected, just like the rest. We need to kill it.”
“No. What about the writing?” Muz protested.
“What about it? Do you really think that thing actually wrote that?”
“Maybe… I don’t know,” Muz said.
“It can’t have,” Chuck told him sternly. “It probably doesn’t even know it’s got it round its neck. It was probably a last cry for help it put together before it was killed. Stand back.”
With that, Chuck raised his candlestick up to his shoulder and drew the handgun from his jeans pocket. In response to the threat, the deformed man dropped the knife from his hand and immediately fell to the ground, cowering.