Z Book
A novel by David K Roberts
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Copyright © 2016 David Kingsley Roberts
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
In this book I have added URLs to locations. If you are connected to the Internet and tap on these underlined sections, you will be taken to Google Maps and show you that particular locale of our survivors. I hope you like this little interactive feature.
Apocalypse
Behold, he cometh with the clouds…
Table of Contents:
Prelude
1 - In The Beginning - Clueless
2 - More Signs
3 - Unanswered Questions
4 - Questions Answered
5 - Puppet Master
6 - Frying Pan or Fire - You Choose
7 - Prêt Survivre, Anyone?
8 - Division In The Household
9 - The Rise And Fall - And Rise of Sneaky Bastard
10 - Once More Unto The Breach
11 - Taking In The Sights
12 - Bridging The Gap
13 - Speedy Solution
14 - Woolwich Arsenal
15 - High Rise Ambitions
16 - The End?
17 - This Is The End, My Friend
Note from the Author
Other Books by the Author
Prelude
It had just gone midnight on a stiflingly hot Friday night. At first it seemed like an ordinary summer’s eve. Not a cloud hung in the sky, yet the temperature had not abated much from daytime levels, and not a breeze gave any relief to the thousands of night time revellers making the most of the fact they didn’t have to work when the sun came up. Those that had not gone to Victoria’s theatres or nightclubs sat outside pubs and cafés taking in the warmth and relaxing over a drink and friendly companionship.
All that changed in a heartbeat. A scream sounded, coming from the entrance to the Underground on the corner of Wilton Road and Terminus Place. All heads turned in time to see a woman running up the stairs, her clothing bedraggled and in tatters as if she had crawled along the dusty platforms. Blood stained her white blouse and her face showed abject fear. With the usual threat of terrorism hanging in the air there was a palpable cringing of those within fifty feet of the escapee. It was a moment before everyone saw the threat. Although it could have been terrorism it could also have been a gang of kids rampaging - it wouldn’t have been the first time, so those further away merely took guarded notice. In fact, most people looked away trying not to be a witness that might be called if the attackers went to court. The human condition was responsible - first rule, protect yourself.
They were all wrong. Hundreds of people, many covered in blood, flooded out of the same entrance attacking everyone not quick enough to get away. In a moment pandemonium ruled. Many of those that couldn’t see what was going on tried desperately to get into the train station and find the first train out of that place. In turn they were attacked by hundreds more blood hungry people pouring from the main entrance.
The violence spread quickly and soon became the focus of the Metropolitan police. Sirens wailed, deafening passers-by; the sheer number of police vehicles frightened those they passed, leaving them wondering what new atrocity had just been perpetrated in the name of religion or freedom. They soon found out as the rampaging people seemed to multiply exponentially until it seemed that there were more infected with whatever it was than weren’t. The police deployed as they had been trained to do, some still trying to don their riot gear before going into action. Some of the officers seemed to start behaving like the people they were trying to quell, and before long there was no blue front line to defend.
Predator drones circled above, filming the evidence, possibly for later prosecution, perhaps to defend politicians as the opposition declared their incompetence at not being able to control the situation. A trend became immediately obvious to those coordinating the emergency response; the strangeness and violence began almost simultaneously in all the major cities, but soon spread to more remote areas. Communications became contained; news of the attacks was suppressed, the authorities believing it was the best way to manage it at the time. As a result, a more over-arching response was never enacted, meaning that news of the problem was patchy and withheld from radio services. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because essential staff became ill or didn’t turn up for work; Cobra was never enacted and the best laid plans for defence died on the vine. They always assumed enough people would survive to run them. Defence would be patchy until it, too, ran out of human resources. Everyone was on their own, only the survivors didn’t know it, not at first.
The streets became eerily quiet, huge flocks of the infected gathering and wandering together. It meant that where the hordes weren’t, these areas appeared untouched by the violence. By the zombies.
*
1 - In The Beginning - Clueless
Hello Dear Reader, my name is Emile. I’m not French; I have this name because my mother always wanted to learn French but never managed, so my name had to suffice. Sometimes it worked to my advantage, girls in my neighbourhood always seemed to like a bit of the exotic.
Anyway, none of this matters, none of my life matters, not even to me. Not now anyway.
Let me explain why I’m five storeys up, on the outside of a building in South East London and about to do something completely insane.
*
It was seven o’clock on a Saturday morning and I and my girlfriend, Becky, had cycled into Town from Battersea. We crossed the Thames at Chelsea Bridge and, using the back roads, we completed the journey in record time. To our surprise there had been little or no traffic, but then again you could never predict the London traffic - not even the experts could do that. The weather was humid and soporific so we gave the excellent road conditions no thought. There is little more fun than cycling into central London on a sunny day.
We came in from the west side of Victoria and realised at once how quiet the Station was. I noticed a couple of small gaggles of what I thought were tourists making their urgent way somewhere or other. Looking back I think that might have been one of the first signs I noticed that something was out of whack. Let’s face it, tourists never ever walked with purpose - and certainly not with urgency. It just wasn’t the done thing, they would normally coagulate on pavements, blocking them completely; they were supposed to walk in unsteady lines, making getting around the city streets a challenge for the natives. I imagine it was the same all around the world and not just in London, so you probably know exactly what I’m saying.
Arriving at the front of the station, the first thing I saw was half a dozen police grappling with two or three difficult scumbags who were covered in blood, presumably their own. One had a spit hood on that already s
howed significant amounts of the red stuff oozing through it and the sight made me instantly apprehensive - I’ve never been keen on the sight of blood. That, and there seemed to be so much unstoppable malevolence in them despite the raw violence with which the police were subduing them. Strange, police officers were so relatively passive on TV shows like Police Interceptors. All in all, I can tell you that it unnerved me somewhat - in the early hours of the End I was still a lover, not a fighter.
On top of this, seeing no-one else around coming or going to the station we decided we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something was up. Everything was unnaturally quiet and quite frankly I feared that if we didn’t get away from there we would end up getting involved in whatever it was. Anyway, those police worried me, the perps had collapsed onto the ground and the police were clambering all over them; it all looked a bit too heavy-handed to me.
We headed across the open area in front of the station’s entrance when we noticed that our tyres sounded strange, as if we were cycling over something sticky on the ground. The sound reminded me of the last time I cycled past the Tate and Lyle factory in Silver City on the north side of the Thames. Years-worth of damp sugar made the road sticky when damp and it sounded just like this.
I stopped and looked down. Our tyres and the pavement were covered in a dark, viscous substance; it looked like old kitchen fat. It never occurred to me that it could have been blood. Looking around I could now see it was everywhere, worse in some areas, almost as if someone had tipped over buckets of the stuff.
“What the hell is this?” Becky asked, stopping next to me. She lifted her foot gingerly from the ground and held on to me so she didn’t topple. She had a look of distaste on her face. “It’s really quite disgusting.”
Pulling a clean white tissue from her pocket she reached down and wiped the sole of her shoe. It came back dark red.
“Is that blood?” she asked, horrified.
I peered closely and sniffed the tissue gingerly. I caught an iron tone in the slightly rancid odour. It was definitely blood, albeit a little rust coloured from exposure to air, or so I presumed.
“Yep,” I replied authoritatively.
I looked around again and noticed that it was also splashed copiously up the walls of the station, as if someone had filled more buckets and thrown it randomly, coating everything in sight like a poorly executed al fresco Jackson Pollock, only with fewer colours. If what they showed you in CSI is at all accurate, then it appeared that I was looking at significant quantities of arterial spray. I was also beginning to catch the stench of decay as the strong early morning sun warmed the pavement.
Seeing the evidence of the previous night’s violence all around me I was dumbfounded that I had missed such obvious signs of localised violence and upheaval. I used to criticise others who walked around in a daze, never seeing anything of significance around them. I vowed to pay more attention from that moment on. Looking further afield I saw that all across the front of the station and into the bus terminal there were overturned rubbish bins, cars with smashed windows, a double-decker bus that had been gutted by fire, and torn plastic police barrier tape streaming idly in the early morning breeze. There were dozens of damaged police vans, riot shields and helmets tossed on the ground and forgotten. I was now wide awake.
We cycled away, keeping our pace up and heading towards Vauxhall Bridge, putting as much distance between us and Victoria Train Station as quickly as possible. In our blissful ignorance of the previous night’s events we decided to stay away from that area for the rest of the day, just in case. All I could think was that we had missed one hell of a party the previous night. Strange there was no report of it anywhere that I had seen or heard; a missed opportunity for the Daily Rag’s reporters.
*
2 - More Signs
As we rode towards the river we discussed what we would do and agreed we would head towards the Embankment; maybe we’d have a late breakfast there. Crossing the river again at Vauxhall and cycling east would work well as we could then avoid the millions of summer time tourists spending their money on some tat or other. Unwittingly we’d done one thing right.
After a while the sunshine washed away our shock at what we had seen at the station - looking back it seems amazing and rather feckless that we could have put to the back of our minds what we had witnessed. Perhaps the escalation of violence reported every day around the world helped to trivialise what we had just seen - after all maybe it wasn’t blood and there were no dead bodies lying around - and by walking away from it the danger seemed to recede, at least in our minds.
After a minute or two we slowed our journey towards the river. It seemed crazy now that we could have been so easily spooked. I noticed the streets remained largely deserted but I do remember seeing several people walking strangely, stiff-legged, drooling and bumping into obstacles such as lamp posts - they also groaned a little but with the thumping heads they had to be suffering following their nocturnal excesses it seemed to me perfectly reasonable for them to do so. Frankly, I took them to be left over drunks, druggies on legal - or not so - highs from the night before; they were probably the dregs of what we had seen at the station, after all Victoria’s reputation for having a ‘good’ time was well-known. The upshot was that at that time they appeared to be no threat to us. I even remember sniggering a little at their plight - my attitude at that time was that anyone who drank or drugged themselves into a state of oblivion asked for any problems they got themselves into.
I could hear a lot of police activity off to the west, dozens of sirens blaring their way through the streets, perhaps chasing someone or rushing to a crime scene, pretty normal for London in the early morning. My exposure to the Apocalypse started out pretty gently - it’s amazing what you don’t see if you don’t want to, we were like babes in the wood, or perhaps more like lambs to the slaughter.
After about five minutes’ ride we stopped just past midway across the bridge next to a red lifesaver buoy and, leaning against the iron railing, we relaxed in the sun while looking down at the brown Thames water, watching its sluggish, restful progress seawards. I have always loved the mesmeric power of flowing water, allowing its unstopping movement and flickering reflections to relax me.
Becky was the first to see the problem. Turning to me, she grasped my arm and pointed at what appeared to be a lump of flotsam near the shoreline.
“What’s that?” she asked, her voice a little anxious.
“What?” I replied, my peaceful thoughts interrupted.
“That, whatever it is, in the water near the beach.”
I peered at where she was pointing and saw something floating sluggishly past what she referred to as a beach but to me was a small and crappy mudflat just beyond the MI6 building. There appeared to be a small amount of movement from whatever it was and suddenly a head popped up for a moment before re-submerging.
“Jesus!” I exclaimed. “It’s alive!”
“Quick! We need to tell someone!” she exclaimed and began to cycle towards the south bank.
I pulled out my phone and dialled 999 as I chased after her. The phone emitted the engaged signal.
“Bloody hell!” I mumbled irritatedly before quickly redialling. The same tone greeted me so I gave up for the moment.
I caught up with Becky and we hurtled around the corner before we came to a gated entrance approximately adjacent to the place where we saw the floater. Dismounting as we approached the yellow security hut we saw no-one around to speak to. Without further thought I dropped my bike, ducked under the security bar and ran towards the river.
“Wait! Where are you going?” Becky cried.
“Better to ask for forgiveness!” I shouted back and kept running, the water now clearly in view. I ran past one of those yellow water duck river ride vehicles parked against the massive concrete and steel-barred wall that fortified the MI6 building. So this is where the damn things hide at night, I thought absently. I’d had a less than perfect ride i
n one once and they weren’t ever going to be my preferred choice of transport.
I could hear Becky’s footsteps catching up behind me as I ran down to the water’s edge and looked for the floating person we had seen. The body was now about forty yards to the right and about twenty away from the water’s edge.
My adrenaline was up and so with no thought about what I was doing, I ran straight into the water and immediately felt the old river’s muddy bottom clinging to my trainers, slowing me down. I fell clumsily forward which broke the suction of the mud, but not before I scraped my ankle painfully against something sharp that jutted out from the bottom. Bugger, that really hurt, I thought. The stinging of the muddy water on the wound was intense and made me wince and slow down a little.
Pain was forgotten as the ice cold water of the river immediately constricted my breathing and I had to force myself to take steady intakes of air, all the while trying not to get river water in my mouth as I swam out to the body. I was beginning to shiver with the shock of cold when I slowed and turned around, looking for Becky. She was standing on the shore, an anxious look across her face.
“Don’t worry!” I shouted back to her through chattering teeth. “I’m nearly there.”
Turning back to what I assumed to be a drowning man I eased over to it. A nasty, foetid stench hit me as I grabbed for an arm. I felt it jerk away, almost seeming to resist my grip. Having had lifesaving training when I was younger, I knew to be wary; it wasn’t uncommon for the rescuer to become the second victim when the rescuee dragged them both down in sheer panic.
Trying the body flip technique I had learnt that forced the person to face away from my body, it screeched like a banshee for an instant before coughing up what looked like a fountain of blood.
“Hey!” I shouted in surprise, trying to get the person’s attention. “Hold still, mate. I’m trying to help you.”
Zombies! Page 1