First Interview (Necromorphosis Book 1)

by CT Grey

  Just as I looked up, it opened fire. A rain of shell casings rattled on our roof as a line a cars burst into flames in the road. One of them exploded and threw a fireball high up in the air.

  “Okay that’s it.” Jaq pulled out keys. “Let’s roll.”

  She flung open the door, and jumped into the road. All the drivers were panicking, pulling onto the sidewalks, jamming into each other, and created an impassable traffic jam. Jaq turned and saw me holding the go-bag against my chest if it was a comfort blanket.

  I don’t know what it was, but something prevented me from following her.

  Maybe it was fear, but I tend to believe it was all about self-preservation as, for the love of God, I couldn’t get myself to open the door, and follow Jaq to the embankment. Especially when I saw the chopper tracers churning trees to match-sticks.

  Jaq didn’t give up. She ran to my side and pulled me out from the van, just as someone shouted: “Oi, Bitch. What you are doing? You can’t do that to a woman.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jaq growled at the man, who backed off. I stood up and brushed dirt off my clothes, and Jaq hissed, “keep moving.”

  I did. There was no point voicing a protest. There was nothing she wanted to hear me say except ‘you’re right’. We ran against the mob who were fleeing from the punishment the chopper unleashed on the riverbank. We pushed our way through, fists and feet flying to keep from being trampled.

  In my mind I knew we should have followed them. And in the end I couldn’t follow her any longer as the desire for self-preservation grew larger than my heroism. Among the row of burning vehicles dark figures were tearing pieces out of screaming people.

  I knelt down at the end of the bridge. “Jaq,” I shouted.

  “Yeah, Jane,” She turned around. “You got a plan?”

  “To be honest,” I looked at her desperately. “No I do—”

  “Then what the fuck are you waiting for? Let’s go and save Alison.”

  “No,” I said. “We need something better than this fucked-up idea.”

  “Then talk to me.” She knelt next to me. “And stop rolling your eyes.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were,” she argued. “That’s exactly what you were doing.”

  She popped her head up and stared at the embankment for a moment. I saw she had something in mind, and it didn’t take long before she put her idea into action. She crouched low and rushed as close as she could get to the steel railings, then turned and signalled me to follow.

  I had no choice but to follow her lead when she disappeared along the embankment. When I got at the end of the bridge, I saw her moving from one tree to another before she reached steps leading down to the muddy river bank.

  I had six centuries of survival experience and why I hadn’t thought about that earlier, I don’t know. I assumed a residual part of the zombie virus still affected my thinking. Then again, maybe it was the drastic situation that made Jaq think outside the box quicker and solve the problem. I followed her lead, thankful to avoid the dark figures, but I didn’t get far before my senses told something was wrong. Very wrong.

  I turned my head and saw a softly glowing chain-gun of an Apache gunship turning towards me. And I realised the gunner had sussed me out. So I’d no choice but to ditch Jaq’s plan and adapt my own.

  Adrenaline surged through my blood, and I sped away, into the trees. I was so lucky it’d not happened a second later, as with every leap I took, a shell exploded where my foot had been an instant before.

  The bullets followed in my path, and when I reached a line of burning wrecks I knew there was no way I was going to able to get through the inferno. The only choice I had was to race down the line, while the wrecks behind started exploding under the Apache’s punishment.

  I needed to get behind buildings, forcing the Apache to climb over them to find me, and I would be safe. I slid over the hood of the nearest car, heard a shriek in the air, and a shockwave threw me into the air as an explosion burst my eardrums, while shrapnel tore through my clothes and the blast threw me against a wall at the side of the street.

  *** Henrik ***

  “What?” Jane asked suddenly. Her eyes were wide open as I sullenly shook my head. “Did I say something wrong?”

  I sighed and crossed my fingers over the notepad. “I’m sorry Jane, but what you’re saying doesn’t sound even remotely believable. You want us to believe that you were able to run faster than a chain-gun can track, and then survive a full impact from a hydra rocket assault? To be honest, it sounds like you’re taking the piss.”

  “Taking the piss…” She glared at me. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, while she reached towards her cigarette case to only realise it was empty. She turned towards Sergeant Red, standing by the door, and I continued: “I’m saying you’re taking the piss by claiming to be able to do superhuman heroics as if I don’t know anything about the Apache. But I do, because I know those machines were designed to take down hard targets, before we found out they were also brilliantly efficient on eliminating the soft ones. So trust me, when I say this: those Apaches have more than proved being able to decimate any kind of threat around the globe.”

  “Just a second,” Jane raised a finger. “Red, could you please give me a smoke?”

  Red turned his head towards me and said, “Sir.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you,” Jane smiled at me. Sergeant Red reached into his combat-vest, and there was a blur as she got up from her chair, sped across the floor, and snatched a packet of smokes from his fingers, before he even reacted. As if nothing had happened she turned towards me, walked back and asked: “Is that so?”

  I blinked. I couldn’t get the words out, as my mind tried its best to understand what had just happened. Jane had claimed enough times that she was far superior to us, her human counterparts. Now I had no choice but to accept that those war machines had never been designed to take out superior human beings. But even then I tried. “Yes, those are the facts, and there would have been such heroics on the eve of the great panic, the air assault crews would have reported something, and by now we would have some sort of document in here.”

  She calmly lit her cigarette and then blew smoke in my face, while she pointed the lit end at the files. “To be honest darling, those look quite thin.”

  “Thin?” I scowled. “What part of those files look thin to you?”

  “All of them.” Jane took another drag and kept blowing smoke on my face. “And if that’s all you got since the shit started hitting the fan, then I’m afraid they look very thin to me.”

  “This…” I tried to find the words. “This is not all…”

  “But…?”

  “But …” I rolled my eyes and then closed them as I took off my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. She was right. The files we had were thin. There wasn’t much data in any of them. It was all just an illusion. We hadn’t had over a decade of time to clandestinely gather intelligence on earthly events, to exert any sort of leverage over the interviewees. “…but it’s none of your business what we have and we don’t have. So just answer my questions please.”

  Jane formed okay with her lips before she continued sucking tar and nicotine into her lungs, while I imagined Harry toasting on me sinking to a new low. And maybe that was exactly what had happened here. And just like my ex-wife, Jane had managed to wrap me around her little finger. And I had to admit I’d not approached her as coldly as I should have done. Instead, I’d given her far more leeway than to any other subject.

  Why? And why wasn’t the Tank stepping in to help me in any way?

  Were they quietly waiting for me to fall from the heights, and catastrophically end this interview, so that they could hear no objections to subjecting her to medical examinations? To be honest she was reaching the point where her hidden knowledge wasn’t going to bring us anything new, and I guessed the only thing keeping her from t
he autopsy table were those three vampires she had said nothing about. I bet the Authorities weren’t going to allow me to turn her to an asset and send her back out there. It was too much of a risk to trust she was going to keep her mouth shut.

  But at the time I’d contemplated those things another thought jumped into my mind. “You said Jaq turned off the radio, but I don’t understand really why, when not only you needed more information on how far the screamers were spreading, but then you asked that same question from your hacker friend.”

  “What question?”

  I scrolled back the transcript and read aloud: “What is going on at the river?”

  Jane looked away and stared at the one-way mirror that only showed a reflection of me and Sergeant Red, and kept quiet. Whatever was going on in her mind seemed really to rub her up the wrong way.

  “What happened to Jaq?"

  *** Jaq ***

  Jaq turned around as rockets swooshed over her head, and explosions rocked the ground. She realised Jane had gone against her word. As always that bitch was now executing her own plan. The one she’d said wasn’t worth following. They’d agreed to get onto the river bank, but it looked like it was business as usual, and she was stuck on her own.

  Here and there, over a burgundy glowing skyline, attack helicopters churned out shock and awe to the civil population as the world was slipping into the brink of chaos and anarchy. It was almost as if the military didn’t have any restriction; no rules other than doing their best to prevent the undead from gaining the upper hand. And who knew what else was waiting down the line? Tanks, bombers, and thermonuclear weapons… if the bridge destruction pointed to anything it was they had no compunctions about indiscriminate targeting of suspects.

  “Why the fuck did you have to abandon me?” Jaq grumbled under her breath as she glared murderously at the Apache hovering over the river; targeting anything moving at the embankment. Going back was suicide. The only way was forward.

  Feeling heavy-hearted Jaq turned back and started slogging through the mud towards the burning remains of a once so-beautiful Albert Bridge. Why they had done it? Was there a purpose to laying waste to everything? Was there not going to be a world tomorrow?

  There were no easy answers. Not even hard clues. But if she’d been the Queen, she wouldn’t have let those goddamn speed freaks fuck up her city. They didn’t look that threatening and Jaq suspected there were only a few hundred of them. To her mind that didn’t justify calling in the military to do their business. It was not like there was an army of undead wandering around the town, eating anyone and anything that had a pulse in them. And if there were, it was not like they were able to overrun the living. No way. Not unless she was absolutely wrong about all of it.

  “Nah.” Jaq shook her head. “I can’t be wrong.”

  In fact, she counted on that being the case, or any minute she was going to start seeing dead creeping up everywhere. And for a moment Jaq stopped to think about the situation under the long shadows of what remained of the Albert Bridge. The more she pondered, the more it seemed she was losing hope. Alison had to be alive. There were no two ways about it. She had to be.

  Alison was one of the toughest people she’d met in her life. She’d shown Jane there was no room for screw-ups in her crew, when the three of them had got into the bloody vampire party at the outskirts of Lancashire. And although she was still a bit unsure about how they got out of that fiasco, in her mind the screamers the metropolitan police had faced in the Parliament Square were nothing compared to three hundred pissed-off vampires charging down the hallways to get them.

  They were cunning beasts. Pure monsters, who stopped at nothing that lay between them and their targets. Yet, she had to admit they’d have all perished, if Alison hadn’t ordered Jane to claim an enormous favour, and conjure the rotten shell of a necromancer to step out from some sort of alcove, to send the horde scattering away.

  And according to his words: “… the prey should never be that easy.”

  Nothing was easy, Jaq said to herself as she left Albert Bridge behind and hurried on, as close to the Millbank embankment walls as possible. Nothing. Life sucked, and you got used to it. That was how the things went on, and that’s how it should have been. But this? She gazed at houses on the south side catching fire one after another. This was beyond hard. It was a horrifying catastrophe.

  Destroying everything that could help people the next day was unforgivable, walking dead or not. What was the point of wrecking bridges in the centre of the city if you left others standing?

  Zombies were stupid animals, just Stiffs. They had no real brain power. And she’d witnessed it more than once. They were so stupid they kept filling their stomachs even though their own guts were hanging out. And that was pure stupidity. Stiffs had not proved to be a real threat. Yet, as she looked down and saw fires illuminating the surface on Thames, her heart starting to race, when she realised that black dots on the surface were actually the living dead.

  “How the fuck…?” She scowled at the first one sloshing out from the river and getting his feet stuck in the soft mud. “Where the hell have you come from?”

  But the zombie didn’t answer. At least not intelligently, as the undead monster raised his arms and groaned loudly. The ones still in the water followed his call and started moving after her as Jaq speeded up her movements towards what remained of Vauxhall Bridge. When she reached pile of concrete slabs and twisted metal, she turned just as another pair of fighters swooshed over her head, and saw hundreds of zombies. The whole northern bank was getting swamped by the creatures of nightmares. And she couldn’t understand how they’d got in the river in the first place.

  It should not have been possible. Nobody had reported them coming out from rivers, just dark places, or had seen them wandering around the streets. Yet there they were, gurgling their mouths and swaying their arms as they lumbered her way.

  Jaq reached behind her and realised the mistake she’d made. The only weapon she’d brought with her was the stake she’d reserved for Jane the other day, and her steel-capped boots, one of which was now firmly lodged between two slabs.

  “You idiot,” she swore aloud. “You stupid fucking idiot.”

  Jaq reached down and tried to pull the boot out of the rubble with all her strength. It didn’t move. However the Stiffs did. The first one of them had already reached the bottom of the heap and started aimlessly trying to overcome the obstacle course, while the others groaned behind Jaq’s back as if they were a group of cheerleaders. As those ghastly moans grew louder, Jaq heard a scream coming from above. She saw a dark figure jump down, burying himself up to the waist in the muddy bank.

  But despite his situation, the screamer didn’t give up. He turned his head towards the sky and released a high-pitched shriek before he locked his hateful gaze on hers. The fall and entrapment had done nothing to his anger. The screamer started dragging himself out from the mud. Then she heard another one wailing directly above her.

  “Oh shit,” came out from her mouth as the abomination landed on top of the rubble pile. She should have kept quiet as the screamer locked his bloodshot eyes on her and started negotiating obstacles as if the screamer possessed a cat’s nimbleness. Then, a couple of heartbeats later, he leaped.

  Jaq raised one arm to catch the monster by the throat in mid-flight, while she used the other to swing the stake. The hardwood crunched as it went through the ribcage, but it did nothing else. The screamer didn’t stop. It didn’t drop dead. Instead he started battering her fiercely, while his mouth opened to reveal vampiric fangs.

  As bloody saliva dripped on her head Jaq squeezed his throat harder and yanked the stake out. The screamer gasped and tried to claw her arm. She thrust her weapon forward, and buried it in his forehead, and in an instant the screamer went limp. With his dead weight on top of her, Jaq felt someone grasping her leg.

  She glanced down and saw the other screamer. How he’d got so far in such a short space of time, she didn�
�t know, but she didn’t stop to ask questions, just lashed out. The boot smashed into his chest and the screamer flailed his arms as he fell back into the river. And she knew there wasn’t going to be much time to spare before he got out again. Let alone the zombies who were crawling on top of each other, trying to reach her.

  “Come on.” Jaq shoved the corpse on them and grabbed her trousers. She gritted her teeth and pulled hard. This time her leg came loose, leaving the boot in the crack. “Fuck it.”

  Without wasting time trying to retrieve it, she turned around and moved to the top of the rubble, only to realise there was no way to reach the jagged edge of the bridge. Not when there were at least thirty hungry zombies mere metres away.

  Jaq heard automatic weapons starting to clatter somewhere nearby and the zombies turned their attention to it. It was like a mating call. But as soon as the sounds died away they turned back towards her.

  “Oh come on,” Jaq moaned aloud. “You don’t want me. I’m bad meat.”

  The dead replied with hungry howls and jerky movements, only to turn around a second later, when someone fired a gun down the river. This time Jaq moved quickly into the shadow where the overhang of Vauxhall Bridge met the bank. However, they seemed to notice her, despite her best efforts.

  What does it take? Jaq thought as she watched the zombies lumbering over the pile, a mindless mass of undead people. What does it take to hide myself from them?

  She didn’t have time to find an answer. Jaq realised the fighting was turning fierce around Westminster and Whitehall. If Alison was still in Thames House, she was in trouble. Especially as more and more zombies were coming out from the river every minute. And some of them didn’t look British at all.

  Maybe it was their ragged clothing that didn’t resemble normal street styles. Or maybe it was their bloated features, which made her think they’d been lying at the bottom of the river for a long, long time. Or maybe they’d just arrived from Hell and this evening was the start of Judgement Day. Whatever it was, it was working against her. The second screamer was less of a threat, but only because a host of his dead cousins trampled over him and pushed him back under the water.