The Z Infection

by Russell Burgess

  I managed to get to the front door, despite the protests from those I was pushing aside. I took a couple of punches to the back of the head but it was to be expected. These people were terrified about what was happening. Many had seen, at first hand, the speed with which the infection was spreading. They could also see what it was doing to those it claimed and I would doubt if any of them would have wanted to become like that.

  I managed to show my warrant card and then squeezed through the door. It took all six of the officers who were stationed in the foyer to close it against the weight of those outside but they eventually managed.

  Once I had recovered and got my breath back, I told the officer in charge who I was and what I had seen. I was asked to wait in a side room, while he made a phone call. Then, to my surprise, I was taken immediately to the Commissioner’s office on a floor near the top of the building.

  He was seated, with a large map on his otherwise cleared desk and just two other senior officers with him, but he stood up as I entered the room.

  ‘Constable Westlake,’ he greeted me.

  We shook hands and he invited me to take a look at the map. There were dots all over the area around central London.

  ‘I hear you have been in the thick of things all day,’ he said.

  I had been, pretty much. My uniform had seen better days and I was exhausted. I must have looked a proper sight.

  ‘I’ve seen a fair bit,’ I said.

  ‘We need a full debrief from you, since you are the first officer to have made it back from the front line, so to speak.’

  ‘I can do that, sir,’ I said.

  This is what we know so far,’ he went on. ‘The red dots signify an incident.’

  I looked at them. There were dozens.

  ‘The areas shaded in yellow are areas where we have either lost control or have had no information from in over six hours.’

  The yellow areas covered huge parts of the city centre, in a rough circle. The boundaries stretched south to St James’s Park underground, just a few streets away and north, to Kings Cross railway station. To the east it reached as far as St Paul’s Cathedral and to the west as far as Kensington Palace. Parts of the south bank were also beginning to get shaded as the infection spread.

  ‘What are the black dots?’ I asked. There were several dozen of them, all close to the red ones.

  ‘That is where we have lost police officers,’ the Commissioner said.

  He turned from the map and gazed out of the window.

  ‘I have informed the PM that the Met is no longer capable of dealing with this and we shall have to hand over responsibility for order, to the army in the meantime. He agrees with that. This is far beyond our capabilities but we will assist as best we can and offer every resource we have to the fight.’

  ‘This is something much more dangerous than we might ever have imagined,’ I said. ‘I lost a colleague in an incident in Whitehall as we were making our way here. There were civilians fighting against…’

  He looked at me again.

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘Zombies.’

  He frowned. One of the other officers looked sceptical.

  ‘We have heard those reports too,’ he said. ‘Fanciful nonsense. Too many ridiculous films and books on the subject have addled peoples brains.’

  ‘With all due respect sir,’ I said. ‘I saw one officer shoot two or three of those things. Double tapped to the chest. They should have been killed outright, but they got back up again like nothing had happened. They just kept coming.’

  ‘They can’t be killed?’ said the Commissioner.

  ‘They can,’ I said. ‘A young boy at Whitehall told us to aim for the head. That’s the only thing I know that stops them for good. That’s what I came here to tell you. That information needs to be passed on to the general public. It might save them. It will at least give them a fighting chance.’

  ‘No,’ said the other officer. ‘All that will do will cause more panic. Really? Zombies? The dead walking the streets of London, preying on the living? That’s what you want us to tell people? It would give us more problems than we already have. Vigilantes on the streets, killing at random. It would be chaos.’

  ‘It’s chaos now,’ I said.

  But the Commissioner agreed with his assistant. ‘There’s no way we can be sure about this, so we wait until we have more information.’

  That was it. I think, if we had acted then and notified the government, we might have had a fighting chance. Instead we waited, not knowing what to do, waiting for others to make the decisions for us. It was a catastrophic error. The infection, which was moving too fast for us to cope with that moment, suddenly upped a gear. Before long it would be completely out of our control, with no chance of regaining it.

  Anna Hasker

  20:25 hours, Friday 15th May, Heathrow Airport, London

  I knew it was going to be difficult getting through the concourse. I dreaded the very thought of even trying, but it was the only way to reach the aircraft. It wasn’t going to wait for us for ever and I knew that the chances of finding another pilot, who could fly us out of there, were unlikely at best.

  Mike was in much better shape, now that he had come to terms with what was happening. I was worried, when I first met him, that he was too intoxicated to be of any use, but he had sobered up quickly when he had seen the slaughter in the departure lounge. It would have been enough to make the drunkest man take note.

  I pointed to a stairway. It led down to an opening at the far end of the lounge.

  ‘That stairway is at the end of this concourse. The opening you can see leads into a wide corridor. It has moving walkways on it and leads to the gate where the plane is. We need to get through the opening and down to the gate as fast as we can.’

  Mike looked unsure.

  ‘There are dozens of them down there.’

  ‘We have to get to that plane,’ I said. ‘There’s no other option. The entire airport is overrun and it’s the only way out.’

  ‘We need a distraction then,’ said Mike, suddenly focused again.

  I agreed with him. One of us would have to try to create a diversion, perhaps lead them away from the opening, so that we had a chance.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  ‘I think I should,’ said Mike.

  He obviously thought, that as the man, it was his duty to save the poor helpless girl. I was used to sexist remarks. You got them all the time as cabin crew. Everyone thought that you were a bimbo, or an easy lay. The fact I could speak three languages fluently, didn’t matter. The fact that I was studying at nights, for a degree in Anthropology, also didn’t matter. As soon as the uniform went on, you were a brainless trolley dolly.

  ‘I think I can manage,’ I retorted. ‘I’m in better shape than you and I know the airport too.’

  He thought about it for a moment, before realising that I was right.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What do we do?’

  Five minutes later we had formulated a plan. I sent Mike to the stairs which led down to the concourse and told him to wait there. I then doubled back to the next flight and walked down them until I was able to see what was going on. I counted twenty people walking around, trance-like. There was nobody left for them to attack. Everyone who had been in that part of the building was dead, had run away or had been turned into one of them.

  I shuddered at the thought of what I was about to do. Once I was sure that I knew where they all were, I quietly stepped onto the concourse. The smell of death was overpowering. There were bodies everywhere, some half eaten. Parents lay on top of children in their last desperate bids to protect them from the savagery. None of them would have understood what was going on. It was horror beyond belief.

  Pulling myself together, knowing that there was nothing that could be done for any of these victims, I crept towards a seating area. Two of the things were checking something at the side of a table. I couldn’t see what it was but I was grateful
they were distracted.

  Carefully I lifted one of the plastic chairs. It scraped in the floor as I lifted it and they turned almost immediately. Christ, they were tuned in. The slightest noise and they were attracted to it in an instant. They started walking towards me. I knew I would have to act now. Standing up, I picked up the chair and threw it at them with all the strength I could muster. It hit the nearest one and bounced off his chest. He never flinched.

  I turned and ran, shouting and cursing them at the top of my voice. The shouts drew the attention of the others and before long I had the whole ensemble following me. I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin as I led them through the piles of bodies, although I knew that these rats wouldn’t be drowning in any river.

  As I got to the stairs I turned to look back, to make sure they were all following me. They were. Every single one of them. The noise was enough to attract them to me. I turned to climb the stairs and suddenly felt a hand around my ankle. It yanked my off my feet and landed hard, banging my head and opening a deep gash on my knee.

  One of them had me. I panicked. He had been buried under a pile of corpses and had been unable to move. I had missed him when I came down the stairs and now, on the way back, I had drifted too close to him. I struggled, screamed and kicked my leg to try to break free. His grip was like an iron shackle. I couldn’t break it. And all the time the rest of them were closing in.

  I reached out, grabbing for something to use as a weapon. Anything that might give me a chance. My hand came to rest on the handrail of the stairs, just where it was joined to the floor. I gripped it with both hands and pulled. He still refused to let go. I pulled again. The crowd was bearing down on me. I could hear their moans and smell the fetid breath as they got closer and closer. I closed my eyes and tried to block out what was about to happen to me. It was going to hurt.

  Then, suddenly, I felt hands on mine. They were warm. Not what I expected. I had imagined them to be cold and clammy, full of spite and malice. These were warm and friendly. I opened my eyes and saw Mike. His face was full of fear, but he was there for me, pulling me to safety.

  The grip on my ankle loosened and then broke as Mike’s strong arms pulled me free and onto the steps. The first one was almost on me as I got to my and feet and we sprinted up the stairs. They followed, of course, but the good thing about them was that they were slow and clumsy. That made it easy to get away from them in the short term. The down side was that they didn’t tire, so they just kept coming.

  When we got to the top of the stairs I stopped to make sure they were following. They were. All of them. What I hadn’t realised was that there were far more. Just around a corner, mercifully away from the direction we were heading, was an army of hundreds and they poured into the concourse and headed for the stairs.

  ‘Run,’ I said to Mike.

  As we raced along the walkway I could see that not all of them were coming up the stairs behind us. Hundreds were heading for the same place we were, the opening at the far end.

  We made it to the far stairwell and leapt down the stairs, taking as many as we could manage in each jump. By the time we reached the bottom the concourse was filled with them.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Mike. ‘There are thousands of them.’

  There was no time to delay. We had to keep moving. I pulled him by the arm and dragged him towards the exit, the baying mob following us in that shuffling, shambling walk that they did.

  In the wide walkway we were able to make better progress. There were still bodies lying around the place, but surprisingly there were none of those things in there. We ran as fast as our legs would move, looking back every so often as the space behind us gradually filled with our pursuers.

  ‘I hope to God that plane is still there,’ said Mike.

  ‘It will be,’ I said.

  I had no idea if it was or not. What I did know was, that if it wasn’t, we were dead.

  Dr Richard Bryson

  20:30 hours, Friday 15th May, South London

  Having seen what had happened at Blackfriars Bridge, I was now working on an assumption that what we faced was a fast acting virus which we had never encountered before. It appeared to be taking over the bodies of those it infected and causing them to attack the uninfected. What I needed to do was get this information to the government as soon as possible, so that we could formulate some sort of plan and try to find an antidote.

  Taff had tried to get through on his mobile, but every number he dialled was either engaged or unavailable. The telephone systems were creaking under the weight of calls.

  In order to get an antidote I knew that I was going to need one of the infected, as a subject to examine. I talked it over with Taff. He wasn’t keen on the idea, naturally, having seen what an infected person was capable of. He was of the opinion that we should get to Earl’s Court and report our findings as they stood. My argument was that the virus was acting so fast that it was likely to have spread throughout the entire city before the end of the week. That could mean death for millions of people.

  Eventually I persuaded him to follow my plan of action. We would capture one and bind its arms and legs to stop it thrashing around. We would have to be careful, of course. Avoiding the mouth would be essential. Bites and scratches, it seemed, were one hundred per cent fatal.

  We stopped the car and I quickly phoned through to the dedicated government number. Thankfully I got through and Anthony Ballanger answered the phone. I could sense the relief in his tone, when he heard my voice.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘We’ve had information that some of the hospitals are being overrun with the infected.’

  ‘We never made it that far,’ I said. ‘We turned back before we got to Holborn. We’re back on the south bank now.’

  ‘Did you come over Blackfriars Bridge?’ he asked. ‘Did you…?’

  ‘We did.’ I replied. ‘It was carnage, but that’s what I want to talk to you about. I have a plan, but I need to capture an infected person first. ’

  He wasn’t sure about it, but I told him it I needed a living subject to examine. I gave him no choice in the matter. In order to understand our enemy, we were going to have to take one prisoner.

  Of course it is an oddity, when you are at war with the dead, that they never surrender. They don’t suffer from a dip in morale, they never give up and they don’t understand pain. Those things make normal humans vulnerable, but it also makes us careful. The major fatal flaw of a Zombie, from what I had seen, was that it had no concept of fear. That’s why they continued to walk towards you in droves, while you systematically popped them off, one at a time, in the head. They didn’t realise they were being wiped out and they didn’t fear death like us.

  So that made taking them prisoner almost impossible. They fought to the death. Every time. No exceptions. They were the Samurai of the netherworld. The Kamikaze pilots, or suicide bombers of hell. Even the Japanese, so proud of their fighting traditions in World War II, sometimes surrendered. Even the Spartans of old, who always fought to the death, surrendered in their hundreds on Sphacteria. Not Zombies. No negotiations, no surrender. Fight to the death. If they had a motto, that would have been it.

  But it had to be done. We simply had to take one alive. Or dead. Or whatever they were. And it was Si, the youngest member of the team, who came up with what we all agreed was the best chance of success.

  Kim Taylor

  21:45 hours, Friday 15th May, Buckingham Palace, London

  After the massacre at the front gates of Buckingham Palace I didn’t want to be anywhere near that side of the building. Someone had asked the soldiers if they had any food and shelter. They managed to come up with a few tents and some bits and pieces of food from their kitchens, but it was pretty obvious to me that there was never going to be enough to feed us for very long.

  Ellie and I were given a tent and told to pitch it on the lawn. So there we were, camping in the Queen’s back garden. I’m not sure what she would have thought about it, but ma
ybe she saw us on the news. There were certainly plenty helicopters circling above our heads, filming the scene.

  We were cut off. Totally and absolutely. The swarm of those wishing to get inside the gates, to kill us and do God knows what else, was growing by the hour. They had finished off those who had been unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle and were turning their attention to the gates, rattling them and moaning in that awful way they did. That moan. It was like they were in constant. Maybe they were. Who knew?

  Occasionally there would be a shot from one of the soldiers. We wondered if those outside had learned how to climb. It didn’t seem likely. They were like very basic humans, unable to do very much except walk and eat. They certainly didn’t make any attempt to communicate with us.

  We settled down that first evening, with a tin of beans and a few slices of bread between us for dinner. I had no idea what was happening in the outside world. I didn’t know if my parents were still alive, or my younger brother. I must have dropped my mobile phone while we were running. Ellie still had her one but the battery had died long since. Bloody batteries. I told her some of the soldiers must have had a charger but she didn’t want to bother them. They had enough on their hands right now.

  We went to sleep to the sounds of the restless dead pounding on the gates of the palace, wailing in monotony. You wouldn’t think we would have been able to sleep, but we did. I drifted off, telling myself that everything would be better in the morning. What a fool I was.

  Callum MacPherson

  22:00 hours, Friday 15th May, Buckingham Palace, London

  I knew things were really serious. All the communications we had received were the same. There was an outbreak of some disorder in the city, caused, it was thought, by an outbreak of disease. It wasn’t clear. We were ordered to hold our ground and not to allow anyone inside the grounds of the palace. Too late for that, I thought. We must have had about a hundred civilians now camped on the palace lawns. So much for that order.