He jumped, but kept it a mental reaction, keeping his body still so as not to wake Alessa. They lay together in bed, Jack’s body curled around hers. She had her back to him, her body pushing against his. Their hands were clasped, fingers intertwined.
Pulling his hands away gently, Jack rolled to get out of bed. He was as quiet as possible and made it out of the room and into the main body of the flat without causing too much noise. The sun was starting to light up the horizon. The street looked quiet. The undead still milled about, but seemed to be void of any direction or purpose. Jack interpreted this to mean it was all quiet for the rest. They would change that soon.
He got to work in the kitchen making coffee, strong coffee, the way his roommate Terry used to make it. He paused, wondering if Terry was alive, somehow. He hoped so but feared the worst. He was sure that Sue was alive. There was no way even a brainless, flesh-munching member of the risen dead would want to sink its teeth into something as bitter as her.
The thought made him smile and feel impossibly guilty at the same time.
“Good morning.”
The voice came from behind him.
Alessa stood in the light of the rising sun, and as she stretched, Jack felt something else start to rise. He turned away and got back to the breakfast. He found a large platter of bacon in the fridge, the power to which was still running. He wondered how long it would be until that all changed and they were well and truly thrown back into the times of old.
“Good morning,” he said as he popped as many rashers as would fit into the large frying pan. “Did you sleep well?”
“I did. I feel good.” She was behind him, looking over his shoulder at the pan.
Jack wanted to kiss her. The urge was overwhelming; it was staggering in how bold it was. He forced it down. He couldn’t. Not yet. They were leaving to rescue his girlfriend. If he were to cheat on her, the whole mission would be pointless. Their near inevitable deaths would be pointless.
“There is coffee over there, but be careful, it’s strong.” Jack pointed to the coffee pot.
“Strong? I’m Italian,” she said playfully and helped herself to a cup.
Steve re-joined them not long after the sun was up and the need for a night watch was over. They ate bacon sandwiches on thick slices of white bread, covered with ketchup and brown sauce. They ate until they were stuffed, enjoying both the company and the meal. They ate because there was no way to be certain when they would have another real meal.
Chapter 9
“This has got to be at least ten years old,” Jack said.
“Fourteen, but she is reliable as anything you have ever seen,” Steve answered.
“Okay, I believe that, but it’s an old beast. A diesel too, right?” Jack answered.
“Right,” Steve confirmed.
“So it’s going to be noisy. Those things will flock to us. Here that might be ok, we could plough them down, but what if we come across a larger group, or they come at us from multiple sides?” Jack hoped Steve would see his point.
The butcher’s mobile meat van was parked out back of the building. The street was empty, although a shambling figure in the distance indicated that it might not stay that way for much longer.
“I see your point, but what other choice do we have?” Steve asked, staring at his trusted van.
“I don’t know, but we start this bad boy up, they will come running …” Jack left the word hanging as an idea formed in his head.
“What?” Steve asked.
“That’s it. We turn it on. We get that noisy engine running and let them come.” Jack looked at Steve. He knew he was smiling, and was equally aware it was probably a somewhat lunatic grin.
“I don’t … wait, I get it. We bait them with the van, and head out the other way.” Steve smiled.
“Exactly. Now let’s move it a bit.” Jack wasted no time putting his plan into action.
Between them, they moved the van towards the end of the street. Repositioned just short of the crossroads. It was blocking the road, meaning it was exposed on the long side, but also afforded them a degree of cover to make their escape.
“So what do we do? We turn it on and run?” Steve asked.
“If we have to. What do you think, Alessa?” Jack turned around, but Alessa was nowhere to be seen.
His heart froze, and in that moment, his world ended. He looked over at Steve and saw a look of shock and fear on the older man’s face.
“Where is she?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know. She was right here,” Steve said.
“Shit.”
“Double shit. We’ve got company.” Steve pointed to the right where two freshly turned, leaking death-walkers were ambling their way.
“Fuck.” Jack felt his heart start to race.
Before leaving the shop, they had each armed themselves with a range of large professional knives. Steve held a large meat cleaver and a cooking knife, while Jack had taken a seven-inch boning knife and a ten-inch fillet knife. He also had a ten-inch chef’s sharpening steel tucked into the belt of his shorts.
“I’ll take care of them. You find Alessa,” Steve said, gripping his knives.
At that moment, a car came speeding up to them, coming to a halt just short of running Steve down as he turned to engage the dead.
“What the hell?” Steve gasped as the driver’s door opened.
“I knew we couldn’t go anywhere in that noise bucket, so I went and found us something quieter,” Alessa said, smiling, leaning against the car.
“A fucking Prius, that’s genius.” Steve laughed, clapping his hands together.
“How did you find it?” Jack asked.
“It was parked down the street,” Alessa answered.
“How did you start it?” Jack couldn’t help but ask, even as the two death-walkers were closing the distance to them.
“My dad was a mechanic. He showed me a few things when I was growing up. Now, let’s go,” Alessa said, her voice firm and commanding.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said as he got into the car.
Steve turned around and buried his cleaver into the skull of the first undead walker and stabbed the chef’s knife through the face of the second. Both went down in a crumpled heap.
“Let’s go,” Alessa said again, impatience creeping into her voice.
“You get in, I’ll drive. Just let me get this started.” Steve turned back to the meat van and cranked the engine.
The engine growled and spat, stuttering a couple of times before finally roaring to life.
Leaving it, Steve jumped into the Prius, shifted it into gear, and they were away.
Chapter 10
The drive was a relatively straight forward one. The roads were largely empty, and while there were groups of the undead meandering through the streets, they paid little attention to the silent car as it drove along.
Steve kept the speed slow and steady, steering the car around the body parts and general debris in a single fluid motion.
By avoiding the motorways and keeping to the smaller side roads, they made good time. Steve seemed to have the twisting and turning roads and tributaries committed to memory, for never once did he stop and show any hesitation as to which way they should turn.
The car was silent both on the inside and the out. Nobody felt the need to talk. Steve looked rather cramped for space behind the wheel, but he did not complain. Jack sat next to him, the knives resting on the dashboard in front of him. Alessa sat in back, watching intently out of the driver’s side windows.
From street to street, the neighbourhoods remained largely the same. Residential buildings and a scattering of small businesses and off licenses.
It wasn’t until Steve finally brought the car to a stop that conversation was needed.
“Where are we?” Alessa asked.
“Harringray,” Steve answered.
“Why have we stopped?” she asked.
“Just down there is Saint Ann’s Hospital. You can
’t see it from here, but it is just down the road. My sister-in-law used to work there,” he spoke calmly, staring out of the window, down the street to where a group of the undead had turned their way.
“Used to?” Jack looked at the crowd, which numbered probably close to a dozen.
“Yeah, I guess they don’t have much use for her now. You see that thing there.” He pointed with one of his large sausage-like fingers.
“A death-walker. Yes,” Alessa spoke from the back.
“Yes, well, that’s her.” The emotion came into his voice. “I guess they were holed up in the hospital. I don’t know, but that is her. I’d know her from anywhere.” A tear ran from his eye, and he wiped it away.
For a second, nobody spoke. The undead crowd grew closer, their eyes a mismatch of red and grey. At the centre, surrounded by death, was a reanimated corpse whose eyes were as black as night.
“He did it,” Steve said, not needing to point for the others to know who he meant.
“They are getting pretty close.” Alessa felt the need to point it out from her location in the back seat.
“It’s the eyes. The eyes tell it all,” Jack began, remembering what George the undertaker had told him. “Red ones and grey ones. I think black means they have been dead the longest. The senior death-walkers.”
“Can we move now?” Alessa implored again from the back.
“Yes, yes, sorry,” Steve said, pushing his foot to the floor just as the crowd reached the car. They drove away, cresting a hill and leaving the undead gathering behind them.
They continued on for a few moments, before coming to a simple crossroads. Steve looked both ways. Traffic was busier here. Cars stood scattered in both directions. The undead loitered around the stationary vehicles as if they were some shrine to be honoured.
There had been a wreck; a car was lying on its roof, stretching across both lanes. Even from a distance, they could make out the couple in the front seats. Their snarling frames forever locked in place. Farther up, a corpse in cycling gear was crawling along, its mangled legs mashed and caught in the twisted frame of its bicycle. The metal scraped as it dragged along the floor, leaving a meaty trail behind it, like a gore-leaking snail.
“What way?” Jack asked.
“Either way is good,” Steven answered him with a long exhalation.
“Both are blocked,” Alessa pointed out.
“Then straight on it is.” Steve couldn’t help but smile. “Let’s Die Hard this son of a bitch.”
With that, the car took off, mounting the curb with a heavy bounce. It entered the park going faster than they had in a while, and sped off over the grass.
“If we can make it through the Finsbury Park, we can head out around the Emirates Stadium and bring it down closer to Camden,” Steve instructed, reciting the place names. Neither Jack nor Alessa argued with him, neither had a good grasp of London geography.
The road through the park was a simple but unstable one. The car held its own on the slick grass, but the trees and other obstacles that came their way made the adventure all the more exhilarating. They swerved around a large group of zombies who looked to have once been a group of powerwalking housewives.
“Watch out,” Alessa shrieked as two more death-walkers appeared from behind a group of trees. It was too late to avoid them. Their bodies impacted on the car with a heavy thud. Blood splattered over the windshield as their day-three bodies, bloated with rot, burst.
“That was close,” Steve said, firing the water jets to try to clear the window.
“That only seems to make it worse,” Jack felt driven to point out.
They drove on, their speed increasing to match the urgency of their situation. The park was a hive of undead activity, from men and women through to children and even the bloated, vein-covered face of an infant, which was peering over the edge of an abandoned pram, snapping hungrily at anything and everything.
Once they had made it through the initial mass of the undead, the car found a wide path that snaked through the grass and around the trees. They came close to losing control as they sped over a bridge that crossed a large stream. A group of people in what looked to be a wedding party appeared just as the car hit the bridge. They were running at a pace, but seeing that they were human, and very much alive, Steve could not help but swerve. The car went off the bridge, but had enough momentum to clear the water and bounce up the bank.
Gunning the gas pedal, Steve pushed the engine and pulled them out of the muddy ground and back onto the path, right into the path of the oncoming bride and groom. The bride was missing her chest, the skin split open so that each unsupported breast was swinging way out to the left and the right. Her rib cage had been opened, revealing the bloody lungs beneath. Her long wedding dress was more scarlet than white, and had a severed foot caught in the train, bouncing along behind her like tin cans attached to the rear of the wedding car.
Her partner was wearing a fitted tuxedo, a steel-blue number that fit his well-built frame perfectly. His jacket was unbuttoned, his dress shirt drenched in gore from the gaping wound on the side of his neck.
There was no way to avoid the pair, and so Steve held the car steady and drove over them. The groom went down, the car bouncing over his body, crushing the bones and bursting the skin like trodden fruit. The bride was not so lucky. She hit the front of the car, her body driven forward so that her face smashed into the metal bonnet. She bounced up and over the car, her skull crashing against the windshield, shattering the glass. She fell into a broken heap on the floor, her dress shredded, her body shattered.
Yet without pausing to examine her wounds, she scratched and clawed her way over the ground towards the stunned and stationary wedding party.
“We should help them,” Alessa called from the back. Her face had paled from the sight and sound of the woman’s body shattering after hitting the car.
“If we stop, then we are dead,” Steve answered.
There was a large group of the undead to their left and an even larger gathering to the right. They were closing in on them, shutting down their exit line through the park. The main road that ran along the park was close, they could see the cars sitting there, abandoned.
“Hold on,” Jack said as the car hit the groups closing in. The sides clipped the first few members of the undead party, which must have numbered fifty in total. They were sent flying, legs detaching at the moment of impact, spinning off in another direction with a spurt of congealing, black blood.
“We made it.” Jack couldn’t help but sound relieved. He turned to look at Alessa, who returned his smile.
“For now,” Steve said.
They exited the park and headed east. The road was busy, but it was not blocked. With a little bit of care, they managed to circumvent the traffic and the undead. There were not many on the road, the lure of the park and the fresh meat that it offered seemed to have pulled most away.
They crushed the skull of one death-walker who had fallen from his car and was lying half in and half out.
There was no point swerving, and the already-damaged skull crumbled without even registering a real bump against the car’s suspension.
“I’m not sure how much longer this thing is going to hold out. It has taken quite the beating. I’ve got lights on all over the place, and I don’t think any car, let alone a Prius, should be making the noises I am now hearing,” Steve said to his two companions, but his eyes were focused on the obstacles before them.
“Then we need to change cars,” Alessa said.
“How far is it on foot?” Jack offered, a secondary plan forming in his mind.
“We can look for one, sure,” Steve answered Alessa first. “Walking, well, I would say about an hour or so, on any given Sunday. Right now, I wouldn’t even want to think.” He looked at Jack for a second.
“Then another set of wheels it is,” Jack agreed.
The car died on them not much later, conking out in the middle of the road.
“
Only one thing for it,” Steve said, the reluctance in his voice clear. “Stick together. Let’s just keep moving. Find a car and get on with it.”
They exited the car, and the first thing that hit them was the smell. The air was heavy with the stench of oil and fumes, but above it all came an odour of death. It was not so much rot, although they were all certain upon sampling the current city odour that rot would soon become a regular part of their lives. This smell was purely death. It was a stale smell. The smell of blood and of final breaths gasped in panic. A stench of bloating and swelling, accompanied by the release of the gasses that caused it.
They moved in a close group. Each of them gripping their weapons in white-knuckled terror. The cars on the road were all either damaged or occupied. The occupants not exactly being open to negotiations, due to their ravenous hunger. A series of lorries clogged the inside lane, their trailers brandishing the logos for everything from food and toys to furniture and clothes. There was also a fish van but it was given a wide berth. The fish inside far from being the fresh produce the van promised.
There was a constant growl around them. It seemed to vibrate through the cars and amplify itself, for there was no sign of the dead themselves. Not too many of them, at least.
A large man wearing a trucking cap came towards them. His belly was swollen to the point where his T-shirt barely covered his navel, not because of death, but rather a life of gluttony. His eyes were burning a deep shade of red and he snarled, his lipless face contorting in what they could only assume was a grimace. The raw meat that should have been its mouth cracked and wept thick strands of pus as he gave another deep growl.
“Just keep moving,” Jack said when Steve moved to dispatch the creature. “He’s not the only one around, so let’s just focus on getting a car.”
They found what they were looking for a while later. Having only come across a handful of death-walkers, only two of which got close enough to require disposal, Jack took out one with a right hook through the temple. Steve dispatched of the second, a larger man wearing biking leathers that seemed several sizes too small for him. His beard had been yanked from his face, swinging loose on a thick flap of bloodied skin, only still attached by a thin strip of flesh on his left jaw.
No Zombies Please We Are British Page 9