by CT Grey
The final day Jaq laid her eyes towards the heavens. Could it be true?
If that day had arrived a few years ago, she could have easily accepted that this was the moment when God resurrected the dead. But now, there was nothing really to point any order of that magnitude, and if it was the case, then why the fuck were dead ones attacking the living?
There had to be something else to this and Jaq bet Ali had a good idea what it might be. She needed was to get to Ali quickly. Before the stiffs overran her position. She looked down the bank and saw the tunnel entrance. It wasn’t far. Maybe ten metres or so, and it didn’t seem to be guarded in any way.
“Now’s the time,” she said quietly to herself as she slid down a tall concrete slab, and the moment her feet touched the mud, she ran.
*** Henrik ***
“Mrs McGriffin,” I sighed to the still-standing vampire, who was looking at the mirror as if she was waiting for something. “Would you please sit down, so that we can talk over what is bothering you so much? Please.”
She glanced at me, but remained standing and chewing her fingernails.
“You can tell me whatever is bothering you and I’ll promise we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Jane sullenly shook her head and refused move at all. And whatever was bothering her was not only bothering me, but also the people in the Tank as suddenly I received a message from them. << Get her back in the chair or we’ll put an end to this! >>
“Jane.” I clicked the pen and placed it squarely on top of the case folder. “It was nice talking to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but it’s now out of my hands.”
“Wait,” she said suddenly. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“The war outside,” Jane waved her hand. “I understand why you hid in this bunker, but I don’t understand why you started waging it, when the situation wasn’t really that bad. There were still more living than dead.”
I crossed my hands and said: “I’m afraid that’s classified.”
“Is it now?” Jane moved back to the table and sat down. “Let me tell you how bad I saw it being…”
*** Jane ***
By the time I recovered from the impact, the chopper had left me to stare death in the eye as one of the undead crawled and dragged what was left of his mangled body across the front yard. From the gleam in his eyes I saw it had only one thought, one emotion that drove him to grasp my ankle just as I prepared to shove my boot in his face.
Bastard, I thought. How could it be so fast?
I tried to kick out with the other foot, but it was trapped beneath me. The crawler opened his mouth and let out a loud groan as I searched frantically for a weapon. There was none. The go-bag was lying in the next front garden and all around me were glass shards and twisted pieces of metal. And then the bastard bit and broke his teeth on the steel cap of my boot.
What a stupid creature you are!
I reached out and grasped the nearest piece of metal, but as I sat up the crawler gripped my knee. I smashed the twisted piece of metal into his head with both hands, with all the fury that’d built up in me. The crawler went still. But even though his movements ceased, the zombie didn’t release his hold.
As I pried his grasp open, I looked around. The trees were now mere charred stumps next to blast craters, rubble piles and scorch marks that littered not only grass, but the ground around the burning wrecks. The flames illuminated the street full of mangled biters and their half-dead victims.
Whatever good the pilot and his gunner thought they were doing, it hadn’t worked. In fact they’d rendered the mansions lining the street into places no living souls would venture if they’d any sense in their heads, as they’d blasted open walls and shattered windows and doors. If the people in their houses hadn’t had much choice before, there was even less now. They needed to get out and fight for their lives.
And that thought propelled my efforts as I broke the last fingers grasping me tight and hurried back to scan around for any sign of Jaq. But she wasn’t there. Not among the wounded crawlers and luckily not with the dead people. It looked like she’d followed her plan. There could be no other reason as I doubted she was mad enough to go into central London on her own. That place, whole northern bank of Thames, not only looked, but also sounded like a full-blown warzone; a crazy place, where desperate screams of victims were muffled by the rattle of machine guns and booms of explosions.
It was a place that fought against my instincts. It was a place I didn’t want to go. But despite what I felt I grabbed my go-bag and huddled it against my chest as I backtracked my trail to the embankment to see lonely foot prints in the mud. I stared for a moment at the place where she’d stopped and I realised she’d taken destiny in her own hands. But then I felt a chilling fear shoot up my spine as I saw a large group of bloated corpses lumbering my way. And I couldn’t understand how they’d managed to gather in such large numbers, or why they looked so bloated. Whatever it was, one thing was certain, there was no way for me to follow her without bumping into them first. Then again, I couldn’t abandon her trail completely and assume she’d got as far as Thames House.
Maybe she was still out there, waiting for me to come to her rescue. So I slung the go-bag over my shoulder and ran over the shoreline, while I hoped for the best and feared for the worst. Luckily ten minutes later, I reached the ruins of Vauxhall Bridge without much of incident, and down there I saw marks of struggle on a pile of concrete slabs.
While the trampled body on the bottom of the heap didn’t look like her, I couldn’t but be afraid that she might have got bitten. She might have survived. I continued my journey towards absolute mayhem at the Millbank.
The whole scene looked worse than it had been on the embankment. The London riots a few years back were nothing compared to the images burned into my retina, as I observed cultural heritages bursting with flames behind groups of walking dead that were determinately wandering around, seeking for victims. Luckily there weren’t many of them. Not sitting in their cars; not huddling together in the safety of a few armoured personnel carriers; not in their houses; not even on the roofs or in barricaded rooms screaming for help from the windows. It was almost as if the dead had already overrun the area, and that didn’t give me much hope of finding anyone alive. And I don’t say that lightly. As you might know, the vampires have honed their senses over the years to track any sort of living prey.
This time however I couldn’t pick up anything. Not screams, not heartbeats, not rapid breathing, whispering or even stares. However, what I sensed was absolute terror that tightened in my chest as I moved in the shadows, avoiding confrontation. But I knew it wouldn’t last forever. The zombies seemed to notice me behind the covers. And it didn’t take long before I had a group of them following me down the road - just like those bloated ones had done on the Thames, when they’d started huddling at the embankment walls as if they were my groupies.
No matter where I looked, I couldn’t see Jaq or Alison. They were not among the walking dead or with the dying victims. But I couldn’t pick up their scents either. Not that those would’ve been much help, as smoke billowing onto the streets made everything smell pretty much the same. So I trusted the instinct that they were still alive. Shortly, I reached the corner of the mighty fortress that served the Her Majesty’s internal security interests.
And as with so many other buildings, it too had suffered. Some of its windows were shattered, while a few window panes hung wide open, the curtains flapping wildly outside in the wind.
It was almost as if I was seeing a haunted house.
Why? I asked myself as I couldn’t understand what could have struck the secret service so badly. The zombies couldn’t have accessed it, as they would have had more difficulty getting in than living people. What had gone wrong?
I withdrew into Thorne Street, where I’d spotted a wire fence blocking half of the road. It was a perfect place for me to prepare for going in. I flung m
y bag over the fence, and then quickly followed it before any of my undead groupies managed to catch me. While they gathered on the other side, I placed the go-bag over a stack of concrete slabs that workers had pried off from the sidewalk. But when I opened it, I couldn’t believe my eyes as I saw bottles of Holy Water lying on top of the weapons.
“What good these are going to do?” I enquired aloud to one of the beasts trying to stick his fingers through the gaps in the fence. “That’s right. Nothing.”
And that became a clinical fact, when I chucked one of the bottles over the fence. It broke on one growling walker’s head and didn’t do anything except make him wet. However, the same couldn’t be said as I whipped out a hand crossbow and used it on the sucker standing next to him. The woman rolled her eyes and dropped to the ground as I realised I had a problem. A major one, as with only six bolts remaining, I couldn’t even dream about making a dent in whatever lay inside MI-5’s fortress walls. But neither could I collect the bolt without risking getting bitten again.
However, maybe I didn’t need to as the next three items in the old doctor’s bag were two engraved silver daggers and a short machete. They were the tools I knew that would serve me better than a flimsy crossbow even though I knew from my experience how easy it was to get them stuck in someone’s flesh. With them safely strapped around my waist I looked inside the bag and noticed a bundle of sharpened hair pins. Although I couldn’t do much more than use them to tie my hair back, they were better as last resort weapons than using my fangs to rip open dead people’s throats.
With everything ready, I gave a last look at the zombies on the other side of the fence. They looked increasingly hungry, but they also looked sad. It was almost as if they were begging me to end their lives when I waved them goodbye and released the vampire in me. When the demon formed, I jumped on top of the fence, ran down a window ledge and then dropped back on the street, running as fast as I could.
I didn’t bother with the main doors, or even force the locks on side entrances as I scaled up the wall on Horseferry Road and entered through the first open window on the second floor. Even though the room I landed in was mostly dark I couldn’t miss the signs of carnage. There was blood everywhere. Sprayed on the wall, pooled on the floor and soaked into the papers that had scattered all over the place.
And then I heard them, the ones who’d done it, moving around as they searched for whoever was still alive. So I readied my crossbow and then started moving out, while I searched for any survivors. In the first few rooms I couldn’t find any. There weren’t even half eaten corpses. It was almost as if the northern wing of the second floor had been turned to ravaging, mindless monsters. But even though that dreaded thought of finding nobody alive swirled around my mind like a flock ravens in Tower Park, I kept searching until I found a whole hoard of mindless zombies scraping and pounding at double doors at the end of a very long corridor at the southern wing.
There were probably thirty or forty of them, well-dressed screamers among them. And all of them acted like feral vampires. They were a greater danger than I was willing to face on my own. However, I couldn’t just ignore them, no matter how much I wanted to. Because I realised they were there for a reason. They were there because of the living. And maybe Jaq was in there with Alison.
So I huddled close the corridor wall and kept the crossbow levelled until I reached the almost pitch-black staircase in the middle of it. In the faint orange glare that filtered through the window slits I looked down and then up, before I made up my mind and stepped in. But I didn’t get far before pain exploded in my shoulder. My crossbow clattered on the floor as I spun around ready to stab life out of whoever had attacked me. Thanks to my superior senses I saw a blooded baton flying through the air. I dodged down and then rammed forward. We both slammed on the ground. I raised my blade and was about to bring it down, when Jaq’s fingers wrapped around my throat.
“Jane.” Jaq’s eyes flared for a moment before we heard a scream.
“Let me go.” I grasped desperately as I wriggled out from her hold. It wasn’t a moment too soon as the first runner appeared in the doorway. With one hand I grasped the screamer's tie and pulled him close to my face. He probably thought I was stupid as he opened his mouth while I thrust my dagger upwards and pierced the soft underbelly of his chin. The screamer gasped as the sharp end came out the top of his head. And then he was dead meat that I chucked down the stairs as the next one moved into his place.
“Get up,” I shouted at Jaq as the screamer came in with her arms flailing; desperately trying to score a hit. I quickly dodged right, letting her slam against the railing while another ran in, only to slam himself against Jaq’s fist.
“Here, take this.” I whipped out another dagger and sunk it into the screamer’s back. But Jaq was already executing her own moves as she grabbed his head and twisted it sideways. A sickening crunch echoed from the walls as the screamer went limp and collapsed to the floor. I looked up to see twenty or more of them, all trying to get into the stairway at the same moment. And I knew it was twenty too many. They were twenty that I couldn’t even dream about bringing down without taking a scratch.
“Jaq.” I reached out and grabbed her shoulder. “We need to go.”
“Are you sure?” she asked as if there was even a question about it.
“Positive,” I answered as I heard movement at bottom of the stairs. “More than.”
“Then let’s go.” She kicked out and propelled the nearest zombie back down the stairs, and then turned around to run upwards. I gave a last look to the menace behind us before I ran after her. The chaos in the narrow doorway below was enough for us to buy a few precious moments before I heard harrowing screams echoing from the stairwell walls. But at that point we’d already reached another level. Jaq swung the door open and moved in. I followed her close and then turned around and saw two half naked zombies munching on a victim.
I waved my dagger and said, “Deal with them. I’ll block the door.”
“Consider it done,” Jaq said and as she ran off, I slammed the doors shut and reached down to force the deadbolts home just as the stairway door bent inwards under the combined weight of the infected ones. They’d not given up and I knew there was no way they were going to. Not as long as a raging hunger fuelled their ever-increasing rage.
And I only could hope I would feel the same rage powering through me, as there was no way I was able to force the deadbolts down, because one of them managed to push her hand through the gap they’d opened. I dropped my dagger, whipped out the machete and slashed. The heavy blade went through and left behind a bloody stump that disappeared back into the darkness.
It was enough for me slam my weight against the door and kick down with my boot. The first deadbolt slammed home just as whole mass of them tried to smash the door inwards. I quickly reached up and forced the second in before turning to see Jaq in a bloody rage.
Where she’d got a wooden chair leg, I don’t know. But she was using it to batter the life out of one of the zombies who was miraculously still standing, while the other was trying get up from the floor. I opened my mouth to shout at her just as she cracked the first one’s head open. But I didn’t. Instead I turned around and looked down the hallway to see similar double doors at other end of the room.
“Jaq,” I shouted as I heard a sickening crunch end the groaning. “Let’s go.”
She looked like the grim reaper. “Go where, exactly?”
“The next room.” I said, pointing. “Come on. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Okay,” Jaq replied even though I could see her frowning under that bloody mask. She sloped after me like a disgruntled teenager while I entered the office and stumbled against a pair of half-eaten security guards on the floor. I didn’t know how long they’d been there, and I didn’t care as I brought down my boot heel on their skulls.
“Eww,” Jaq gasped behind me. “That was totally unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary?” I gl
anced at her over my shoulder. “You were just smashing that one’s brains out as if it was going out of fashion.”
“Yeah, but they were alive.”
“Alive…” I rolled my eyes. “How long you think it will take these guys to turn?”
“Don’t know.” Jaq shrugged her shoulders. “And I don’t care. But don’t you reckon it’d be a good idea to at least take their weapons?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that,” and then I reached down to pick up a pistol from the floor. Of course it was empty. The same applied to the second one and to a submachine gun lying under a table. I should have realised it from the quantity of empty casings lying around. The poor security officers had done their best to defend the survivors, but in the end they’d fallen under an assault of nearly immortal zombies. There was nothing else they could have done differently as I assumed they’d spent countless hours training to achieve perfect body shots. The headshots just weren’t something they would have considered.
When you see thirty or forty screamers running towards you at speed, not even the strongest-willed man is going to battle against the odds to survive. Not unless they’d trained hard or were incredibly lucky. But even though their guns were empty I couldn’t leave them behind as I knew that eventually there was a chance to find some ammo to fill their magazines. Besides, if we managed to find ammo, one of the guns was going to be a better replacement for my lost hand crossbow than nothing at all.
“How are you going to get down there?”
I slung the submachine gun over my shoulder and tucked empty clips under my waistline. “Use your head darling. The one our beloved Lord gave to you to do thinking with.”