The Z Infection

by Russell Burgess

  We walked for another two miles, before we came to the area where Kareef lived. He seemed to be excited about being there and was full of hope that he would find his family. One look at the place told me that we would be lucky to find anyone alive.

  The area was leafy green and pleasant. The houses on both sides of the street were large, the kind where you would have expected to find a swimming pool or a tennis court in the back garden.

  ‘Do you live here?’ I asked.

  He seemed surprised at the question.

  ‘Yes. What kind of house do you live in?’

  ‘Nothing like this,’ I said.

  I had grown up in a small council estate in north London, not too far away geographically, but a million miles away in terms of price. My own flat was a small, one bedroom affair and even that was a struggle to pay the rent some months.

  We walked down the street, keeping to one side as we went and using the trees as cover. There were a few abandoned cars. Some had been in the middle of being packed with belongings when they had been left. Something bad had happened there. I could sense it. It was as if the people in this part of town had been taken completely by surprise.

  Further down the street we found some bodies. There were several of them lying in the middle of the street and a few scattered around the driveway to one of the houses. It looked like they might have been family groups. There were children among the dead and I had to look away.

  Kareef seemed to be even more determined, however, and he checked the bodies before we moved on again.

  At the end of the street we turned right and then followed this one until we turned first left, into another. This was the street where Kareef lived and he gasped when he saw it.

  One of the houses had been on fire and was already a gutted wreck. Three fire engines were in the street, all abandoned. Around the machines lay some of the crew, mutilated beyond recognition. In addition to the house, there were several vehicles which had been placed across the middle of the road and had also gone on fire. People had used them as a barricade.

  Behind the vehicles was a scene of utter desperation. Bodies were strewn around, most of them with horrific injuries. One large man had had his stomach ripped open and the internal organs were scattered across the street. A trail of blood led from his body to a nearby house. Others had limbs missing. There were numerous decapitated bodies and one or two of the heads were still active.

  That was the first time I had seen an ankle biter, as we called them. The heads could last for days. It was a bizarre thing to see, but you didn’t want to get caught out by one of them.

  The gut wrenching scene carried on up the street.

  ‘The people there must have tried to stop them with the barricades,’ I said. ‘Then, when they gave way, they had to run.’

  Kareef said nothing. His thoughts were obviously with his family.

  ‘Which one is your house?’ I asked.

  He pointed to a large dwelling on the opposite side of the street. It had electric gates on the front, but they were open and I could see that the front door of the property was lying ajar.

  The whole place made me feel nervous. If I had been there on my own I would have carried on walking and never looked back. It was eerie. It was pretty obvious that the infected had passed through and on to their next victims, but there was always that chance that one or two might have become separated from the main swarm. That happened quite a lot. An area you might have thought was clear, suddenly wasn’t and you found yourself in a world of shit again. I lost count of the people we lost because of carelessness. It almost happened to us that day and from then on we always double checked everything. We became OCD about it.

  ‘We don’t have to go in there,’ I said.

  Kareef shook his head. He knew he had to check inside. He needed closure if his family was in there and he needed hope if they weren’t.

  ‘I have to know,’ he said.

  I totally understood and there was no way I was going to let him go in there alone, no matter how scared I was.

  ‘We’ll need weapons,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything in there we will need to be able to protect ourselves.’

  I could tell he was reluctant. There was something about going into your home, looking for your loved ones while you were tooled up, ready to take them down if they had turned into one of the infected. He didn’t want to be the one who would have to end it for them.

  But in the end I insisted. I went back to the barricade of cars and searched around until I found something suitable. One of the men had been using a meat cleaver. I picked it up and checked the blade. It was sharp. And it was light enough for me to use it too. A few corpses further down the street I found another man who had an axe lying by his side. From the bodies around him, he seemed to have been pretty handy with it. I counted five, all with serious wounds to the head.

  I walked back to the driveway. Kareef was still there, staring at the front door. I handed him the axe.

  ‘You take this,’ I said. ‘It’s too heavy for me to use it effectively, but you’re stronger.’

  He took it without even looking at me.

  ‘Aim for the head,’ I said.

  He looked at me with a blank expression.

  ‘The ones back there,’ I pointed to the street. ‘All the infected ones have head injuries.’

  We said nothing more to one another as we walked through the front door of Kareef’s house. As we went through I was immediately struck by how nice it was inside. His wife, he explained to me later, was interested in interior design and she had set to work transforming their home into something which was essentially English on the outside, but with a Middle Eastern feel on the inside.

  ‘How many rooms?’ I whispered.

  ‘Two living rooms, a dining room, kitchen, utility and a toilet downstairs,’ he replied. ‘Then four bedrooms, a study and a bathroom upstairs.’

  ‘I suggest we stick together,’ I said. ‘Check the downstairs rooms first, then the upstairs.’

  Kareef nodded and we set about methodically checking every room. It was all clear downstairs and in surprisingly good order, despite the fact the door was insecure. I had thought that looters would have rampaged through such a decent area, searching for whatever they could lay their hands on, but it seemed that even they had fled from the terror the infected brought with them.

  We stood at the bottom of the stairs now, neither of us really wanting to go up there, but knowing that we would have to.

  Kareef was first to move. He took the steps two at a time, climbing to a small landing where the stairs broke and carried on at another angle. There he paused, listening for any signs of movement. There was nothing. He carried on and I followed. Soon we were checking through the bedrooms, bathroom and study. Again it was empty. The only signs that something wasn’t quite right, was that several drawers had been pulled out and the contents emptied.

  Kareef sank to his knees when we finished searching, his body convulsing as he wept for his lost family. I put a comforting arm around him as he sobbed, trying my best to reassure him that everything would be alright, despite the fact I knew that it could never be.

  His family were gone. God alone knew where they would be now, or even if they had made it to safety. There was a good chance they were dead, or had been infected, and Kareef knew it.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘They have probably tried to head north to safety. We should too.’

  ‘There is no safety,’ Kareef sobbed. ‘This is the end for us. We are all dead.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure,’ I said, getting angry with him now.

  I was scared too. I was scared that the man who had saved my life three times, was suddenly going to crack up in front of me and leave me on my own. I didn’t think that I could make it on my own. I wasn’t strong enough, or street wise enough to manage for myself. I had to persuade him it was worth staying alive.

  ‘Get on your feet,’ I said. ‘Your family
is out there somewhere and they’re going to need you when we find them.’

  I pulled him to his feet and he rubbed his eyes. They were red and looked sore.

  ‘Besides,’ I said. ‘I owe you my life three times over. You don’t get to give up until I repay that.’

  He somehow managed a smile at the joke.

  ‘Where should we go?’ he asked.

  ‘North.’ It was a firm decision.

  We had been in the city since this had started and it was obvious that things were not improving. Government advice had been to stay put, at home, but that hadn’t worked for the poor sods lying out in the street. How many other neighbourhoods looked the same? We were going to have to move.

  Then I remembered that they had changed their minds. There was a safe zone to the north. I couldn’t think where, exactly, but if his family had managed to escape they might well be there.

  ‘We should listen to the hourly broadcast,’ suggested Kareef. ‘That might give us some idea about what’s going on.’

  He was right. We hadn’t listened to the radio for hours. Maybe something had changed. It would be wise to listen to the reports before we moved on. I checked my watch. It was five minutes to the hour.

  ‘Is there a radio in the house?’ I asked.

  ‘In the kitchen,’ he said.

  We ran down the stairs and into the hall, not really thinking of anything else. And that was when it happened.

  A straggler must have wandered through the front door, while we had been searching upstairs. It was a woman of about fifty and she was standing in the kitchen as I ran in.

  I saw her at the last moment and tried to stop but my momentum was too great and I slipped on the tiled floor. I screamed as I fell and she was immediately alerted to me. I desperately tried to get to my feet, slipping and sliding as I tried to back away from her.

  She was ghastly. I’ll always remember her. She was wearing a tracksuit. It was one of those cheap efforts, that was the uniform of so many in the poorer housing schemes, and it hung badly on her bloated, overweight body. Her face was a mass of lesions, like she had been involved in a particularly ferocious fight and she smelled like nothing I had experienced before.

  She advanced on me until she was almost in touching distance. I could smell the rancidity of her and was close to vomiting, when suddenly Kareef was there at my side again.

  The woman looked up at him, momentarily distracted and he took one swing at her with his axe. The blade embedded itself in the side of her skull and she let out a groan. It sounded like pain, but I already knew those things didn’t feel things like that so I guess it was maybe just from the impact. In any case she dropped to her knees. She was already dead. I could see that the eyes had glazed over almost at once, but Kareef was enraged at the intrusion into his home. He dislodged the axe and brought it bear once again, crashing it down onto the top of her skull and splitting it open with a terrible crack.

  He hit her three more times and her body flopped onto one side. I stood and rushed to the sink, where I promptly threw up.

  Kareef went to the utility room and washed the blood and bits of brain from his axe, then he quietly went to the fridge and took out a can of cola. He switched on the radio and took a seat at the kitchen table, raising his legs and resting them on one of the chairs.

  ‘That’s four times now,’ he said.

  Callum MacPherson

  13:46 hours, Saturday 16th May, Buckingham Palace, London

  I knew at once, that I would have to do something to save those two on the wall. I had lost about half my command in the effort to stop the infected from coming through the gates. It had been an impossibility, but I knew we had to put up a fight to allow the others a chance to get inside the palace. So, now that I had achieved that, it didn’t seem right to leave two of them out there without at least trying to save them.

  ‘I need a diversion,’ I said to one of my men, a Corporal. ‘Get three men and meet me back here in five minutes.

  Every second was going to precious. I raced along the corridor until I reached a large window near the end of the building. I tried opening it but it was stuck fast. I called to one of the palace staff members to assist me. He was an older man of about fifty, dressed immaculately in a dark suit and tie, with a white shirt under a red waistcoat.

  ‘These windows don’t open from the bottom,’ he said. ‘They only open from the top and then only enough to let some air in.’

  ‘How long have you worked here?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty years,’ he replied. ‘I was on the Royal Yacht before that.’

  I pointed at the two figures on the distant wall, just visible between several large trees.

  ‘See those people there,’ I said. ‘We have to get them inside. Is there any way we can do that without opening the doors to the rest of the world?’

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘There is a door around the other side,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  We ran along another long corridor, until we reached the door he was talking about. The footman opened it and we found ourselves in a large room.

  ‘This part of the palace is rarely used for anything,’ he said. ‘There’s a door which leads out onto a garden at the side.’

  I looked out of a small window. I couldn’t see the two figures any more, but I had a rough idea of where they were.

  ‘What about upstairs?’ I asked.

  ‘Some rooms and staff accommodation,’ he said.

  ‘Stay here,’ I ordered him. ‘I’ll need that door opened. As soon as you see me coming, unlock it. And as soon as we are inside I want it closed and locked again.’

  ‘I’ll need to find the keys first,’ he said.

  ‘Do it,’ I called, as I ran back to the others. ‘Meet me back here when you’ve located them.’

  I ran back to where I had spoken to the Corporal. He had assembled his small group and they were waiting for me. Their faces bore the look of concern, but also of a deep resolve.

  ‘There are two people still outside,’ I said, not bothering with any preliminaries. ‘I am not prepared to leave them there without trying to save them. What I need is a distraction. On my order I want all the civilians to go to the windows and start banging on them. That should attract the attention of most of the infected. Once they have done that I will slip out of a side door and through the trees to the wall. I’ll collect the two civilians and we’ll come back in the side door. I need a covering unit, in case there are any stragglers who see us and get interested. You are that group. Any questions?’

  There was a unanimous shake of heads among the men. I spoke to another of my soldiers and made sure that he knew where to position the civilians, then I turned back to my team.

  ‘Right, let’s move.’

  We ran down the corridor and back to the room. The footman was nowhere to be found. I cursed.

  Looking out of the window I still couldn’t see any movement from the two people on the wall, but there were one or two infected wandering nearby. I guessed the two had stayed on their platform. That was good. If they stayed quiet and calm they should be safe there for some time.

  It took about an hour before the footman returned, exhausted and breathing hard. He had a set of keys in his hand and held them up as he approached.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘They had been moved by someone in all the confusion when this all started yesterday.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, impatiently. ‘Just open up.’

  He unlocked the door and stepped aside. I made a quick call on the radio, to my men who were organising the diversion and was greeted with a return message, bathed in a crackle of static. It had started.

  I pointed out a space between the trees to the men.

  ‘That’s where they are, or were,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and get them, you cover me from the terrace and garden.’

  I nodded to the footman. He opened the door as silently as he could and we sprinted out. The covering team fanned out, two e
ither side, as I ran for the first tree. I could hear the noise coming from the other side of the building. The infected had been drawn to the windows and they were creating hell as they battered away at the reinforced glass.

  At the first tree I stopped to catch my breath. I had seen at least two, but I was well aware that there could be any number of the infected wandering around in the area. I checked my rifle and switched off the safety. Speed would be the decisive factor now. It didn’t matter how much noise I was going to make.

  I ran to the next tree and then to the next, crossing the small pathway which led alongside them. I could see the wall through the gaps. It wasn’t particularly high, but it was augmented by rings of barbed wire. I could see the wooden lookout post now. On top of that, and now surrounded by a steadily increasing group of the infected, were a young woman and a man in his thirties.

  The two were doing their best to hold off the infected without making any more noise than was necessary. Others were still being attracted to it, though, and I knew I would have to act fast.

  I walked out from behind my tree and aimed the rifle. I shot the first two through the backs of their heads before the rest knew what was happening. As those first ones dropped, the others turned to face me. I shot another and another, then shouted to the two on the structure.

  ‘When they come for me get down and run. Head for this side of the palace.’

  I shot another two and still the others came towards me, fearless and resolute in their determination. How I wished I could have a hundred men the same. I fired another sixteen rounds, emptying my magazine and there were yet another dozen to deal with.

  I began to back away and slipped another magazine into my rifles as the two leapt from the lookout post and started to run. They hadn’t got much further than about twenty metres when the man fell, going over his ankle on a fallen branch. He cried out in pain and the girl stopped.

  ‘Keep moving,’ I yelled. ‘I’ll get him.’

  I had now reloaded and was firing at the group once more. Every one I hit in the head, dropped to the ground. The more I killed the easier it became. I was almost in a trance-like state. I didn’t care if they were men or women, young or old. It didn’t matter anymore. They were the enemy and I was at war.