The Z Infection

by Russell Burgess

  Taff tapped his phone a few times and waited. The rest of us strained to listen to the conversation as a voice answered.

  ‘Taff here, sir,’ said our leader.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked the voice.

  ‘Windsor racecourse.’

  ‘The racecourse?’ said the voice. ‘What’s the situation there?’

  ‘All quiet,’ said Taff. ‘One or two infected walking around, but nothing we can’t handle.’

  ‘Do you still have the professor?’

  ‘He’s safe,’ said Taff. ‘We have some important information, sir, but we can’t get through the swarm and into the castle. Can we get picked up?’

  ‘The chopper is out on a mission at the moment,’ said the voice. ‘It should be back in an hour. I’ll call you back when I can help you. In the meantime stay safe.’

  Taff rang off and looked at us.

  ‘You heard that?’ he asked.

  We all nodded.

  ‘Okay, we rotate sentry every half hour,’ said Taff. ‘Shaky, you take the next watch and give Si a break, then you Tony.

  I settled down on the deck and Taff handed me a bottle of water. I was desperately thirsty and tired. We had been on the go for hours and hadn’t slept properly in all that time.

  Taff asked, ‘Do you think there’s anything we will be able to do about this mess?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I have no idea. It’s not exactly something I have encountered before.’

  The dead were walking the streets. This wasn’t something that anyone had encountered before. It was unique.

  I had never felt so helpless in all my life. Usually there is a cure somewhere for an illness, even if you don’t know it at that precise moment. There’s always some way of fighting it. We had cured so many diseases throughout history. Things like measles and polio, for instance, which had been common, were now rare.

  ‘How do you cure someone who is, to all intents and purposes, already dead?’ I asked. ‘You would have to be Jesus himself to pull that one off. It’s impossible. The only thing I can think of is to stop others from contracting the virus in the first place. Cut it off at the source. If a bitten person could be prevented from dying and then turning, then that would give us some hope.’

  ‘And the infected?’ Taff asked.

  ‘They will have to be exterminated,’ I replied.

  It was the only solution.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mike Bradbury

  15:40 hours, Saturday 16th May, Kinross-shire, Scotland

  The plane had come in at a sharp angle, across a large loch, towards the landing strip. Anna had already told me what the plan was and that it was likely to be a bumpy landing. I’m no expert on aviation and I was far from clued up about aeroplanes and landing them, but I was pretty sure that a grassy field, designed for lightweight gliders, wasn’t going to be suitable for the type of aircraft we were on.

  I buckled myself into my seat and watched through the window as we got lower and lower. There were a lot of scared people on board that flight. I was one of them. Having escaped, quite literally, from the jaws of death, I was now convinced we were all going to die in a fireball.

  Down we went, lower and lower. I felt the familiar tug as the Captain slowed the engines and we jerked forward like the brakes had been applied. Then the water ended and we were over trees and then fields. I saw a parked glider on one side of the field, then another. We were only feet off the ground. Then we hit it.

  There were screams and shouts from the passengers. I couldn’t see them, sitting in one of the crew seats near the kitchen, but I could imagine the terror going on in there. Dozens of people didn’t even have seats.

  The aircraft seemed to lift off the ground again, after that first contact, then it hit hard once more. The pilots did their best to control it, but with several tons of aircraft to contend with it wasn’t easy. The plane lurched and pitched as gravity did its work.

  The pilots must have hit the brakes then, because the next thing we were skidding. We veered alarmingly to the right, bumping and rocking on the uneven surface as we careered towards a building. I couldn’t see what was happening, but I learned later that it was the clubhouse for the gliding school and we couldn’t stop in time.

  The aircraft plunged through the thin walls of the building. The noise was deafening as metal grinded on metal and was mingled with the terrified screams of the passengers. Then, I heard something else. There was a noise as something, perhaps a fuel tank used to supply the small aircraft which towed the gliders, had ignited. I don’t know what it was, but a hiss turned to a roar and then the whole building seemed to ignite as we drove through the remainder of it.

  The aircraft must have been showered with aviation fuel and it took just one tiny spark to set the whole thing off. We were on fire.

  Luckily, the impact on the building had slowed us considerably and before long we were almost at a stop. Anna was by my side at once, before we were even stationary.

  ‘We need to get off now,’ she said.

  Her voice was charged with urgency and I immediately unbuckled my seatbelt as she fumbled with the emergency exit. She pulled it open. We were still moving but it wasn’t fast and she pulled a lever at the side and it activated the emergency slide.

  Grabbing me by the arm, she pulled me towards the door and shoved me out before I could protest. I hit the fabric and slid on my back, all the way to the ground, landing in an unceremonious heap on the grass. The aircraft had managed to stop and one other emergency slide had activated towards the rear. As we halted, the front of the aircraft suddenly erupted in flames, engulfing the cockpit. I couldn’t see how anyone could survive in there.

  ‘Run,’ shouted Anna. ‘The fuel tanks will go next.’

  She was helping others to the door, pushing them out if they were taking too long, as the flames took hold and began to spread. I could see a river of fire, running down the length of the roof as it followed the trail of fuel. It spilled onto the wings and into the engines.

  ‘Jump,’ I shouted to Anna. ‘You can’t do any more.’

  She grabbed another woman and pushed her onto the slide, before taking hold of a young boy of about ten and jumping with him. They slid to the bottom and I pulled the boy to his feet. He was terrified. We all were.

  Anna was on her feet seconds later. We didn’t say a word to one another. We didn’t need to. We didn’t have time. We ran for it, along with another twenty or thirty passengers who had also managed to get out. And as the flames finally reached what was left of the fuel in the tanks, an explosion ripped through the main cabin, incinerating those who were too slow.

  The blast knocked us off our feet and onto the grass. We lay there for a long time, stunned by what had happened and the narrowness of our escape, as several more explosions ripped the aircraft apart. When I finally had the courage to look back again, I saw just a burning shell.

  Anna was the first to her feet, staggering back towards the plane, still in that flight attendant’s role. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the intensity of the flames. There was nothing that could be done any more. All who could have been saved had been and she had done more than many people would have done.

  We could only watch as the metal melted in front of our eyes, hypnotised by the sight of the burning wreckage.

  The survivors gathered together, far enough away from the aircraft to be safe from any further explosions. There weren’t many of us. The fire had ripped through the plane so quickly that most had been trapped.

  None of us knew what to do. Anna found a first aid kit that had been thrown clear and had miraculously survived. She set about administering what care she could to the injured. Most were walking wounded. We stayed on the grass for two or three hours, I think, too stunned by the narrow escape to make any rational decisions.

  It was a shout, much later, from one of the other survivors, as I was checking on some of the other injured, which alerted me to a new da
nger. I couldn’t make out what he was saying at first. Then it hit me. He was pointing across the field to a figure, stumbling towards us. My initial thought was that it was another survivor, perhaps someone who had been thrown clear by the explosion and was dazed. Then I heard the screams of others as they suddenly realised this was no survivor. That person was infected.

  Through the smoke of the wreckage she staggered forward. And she was followed by more and more, until there were dozens of them. All attracted by the crash. All after one thing. The survivors. Not for the first or the last time did I hear the next words.

  ‘Run for your lives,’

  Clive Westlake

  15:40 hours, Saturday 16th May, Kingston, London

  By the time it was the middle of the afternoon I was feeling stronger. I had continued to doze, off and on, during that period, but my body wouldn’t let myself drop into a deep sleep. It was looking after me, while my senses were still numbed.

  The noise was significantly less as well. The infected that had spilled into the compound earlier were now quiet.

  I crawled to the edge of the roof as quietly as I could. I figured that they might have short attention spans and if they couldn’t see me they might have given up and wandered off, thinking I had escaped. When I got to the edge I slowly looked over, into the compound. There were still a few there, wandering around, but nothing like the numbers there had been earlier. I could only guess that the others had gone back out the way they had come in. There was nothing there for them, after all.

  I came back from the edge again, once I had seen what I wanted. I didn’t want to attract any attention. If they thought I had gone that suited me perfectly. The last thing I wanted to do was to get them all riled up again and attract hundreds more.

  I crawled back to the other side of the roof. I had my bearings now and I knew it looked down onto the street. I couldn’t stay where I was for much longer. I was hungry and becoming increasingly dehydrated.

  When I got there I was pleasantly surprised to see that the street was empty. Every so often I heard a noise of something. Sometimes those things walked into parked cars and set off the alarms, other times they were just searching for food and made a lot of racket doing it.

  I made my mind up that I would have to go. The drop to the street was quite far, but I was sure I could manage it. I was out of other options in any case. I double checked the street, both ways, to make sure it was safe, then I lowered myself off the edge of the roof to make the fall as easy as possible. I hung there for what seemed like ages, before I gritted my teeth and let go.

  The fall took no more than a couple of seconds and I hit the ground with a hard thump. I then rolled to one side and sat back against the wall of the building as I caught my breath and searched for any signs I had been heard. I hadn’t.

  Getting to my feet I checked around the first corner, before jogging off. I could hear gunfire in the distance, a long way off. It wasn’t the first I had heard, but this was sustained and I wondered if the army was now retaking the city. It ceased before I had gone more than half a mile.

  On the corner of a street, a good distance from Scotland Yard, I came across a grisly scene where a large group had obviously been cornered by a mob of infected. There were a lot of bodies there and I tried not to look at the mutilated corpses. It had been a savage and bloody fight.

  What I did find, among the dead bodies, was a bicycle. It was a mountain bike and was in good condition. The owner (I was guessing it was the owner from his cycle helmet) was lying dead, in a pool of dried blood, his chest ripped open and his head almost torn off.

  I pulled the bike onto its wheels and checked it over. The tyres were still inflated, which was the main thing, and the brakes worked. It was ideal. I could move quicker now and without making too much noise.

  Without a second glance at the scene of the massacre I jumped on and pedalled away. I wanted to be as far from the area as possible, but I also needed to know what was going on. I had lost my mobile phone somewhere, perhaps during the fight inside the police station, and I decided that I would have to find a television set or a radio. That should give me some idea of what was happening and which direction I should be heading.

  Claire Samson

  16:15 hours, Saturday 16th May, Central London

  Xiaofan was a real tonic for me. Apart from Rupert, I had had no one to talk to and even after just a couple of days it was beginning to take its toll on me. The first thing I wanted to do, after we had eaten and tidied up, was to check all the other flats in the block. Xiaofan was reluctant at first, but I managed to persuade her that it was a good idea. There were two mouths to feed now and I also hated the thought that there might be infected people in any of the neighbouring properties. Besides, she had a gun and that put us in a much better position.

  We decided to work from bottom to top. On the ground floor I checked the front and back entrances to the common stairway again. Both doors were still secure and now clear. No signs of any of the infected. They had probably wandered away when they could no longer see us. Once I had done that, we checked the ground floor flats which had been locked. Xiaofan was able to pick the locks on most of them and I was amazed at the speed she did it.

  Each flat was empty and we ransacked them for everything we could carry. We did the same with the next levels, until we found ourselves on the top landing. It transpired that there were only two flats here, both locked. We had to force the door of the first one, because it had a lock that Xiaofan couldn’t get through. It was empty. I mean completely. It looked like the people had moved out and the new tenants hadn’t had time to move in before the infection had taken hold.

  There wasn’t a stick of furniture or a single thing in any of the cupboards. We moved onto the adjacent flat and this time Xiaofan managed to pick the lock with some ease. We called inside when the door swung open. It was her idea. She had told me about it on the ground floor. She worked on the theory that if we called they would come, rather than stumbling into one as we tried to clear individual rooms. It was a good idea. The flat was unoccupied.

  We went through every room. It was a huge flat, really well appointed with good furniture and it had large windows that looked out over the rooftops. There were several rooms, including two large bedrooms, each with a double bed, and a beautiful kitchen with all the latest gadgets and appliances. The cupboards had plenty food in them and the fridge freezer was also well stocked.

  I was making a quick count of the provisions, working out how long they would last us, when Xiaofan called to me.

  ‘Claire, come and see this.’

  I walked through to a small utility room, just off the kitchen. There was a door lying ajar and I could feel the cool air drifting in from outside. I pushed it open a little further and stepped out onto something I hadn’t expected. There was a rooftop garden occupying the space. Whoever had lived there had been a keen gardener. There were pots of herbs and larger raised beds of different kinds of vegetables.

  ‘We hit the jackpot here,’ said Xiaofan. ‘This is gold.’

  She was right. The store cupboard stuff was great, but limited. It was all soups and beans and dried food like pasta and rice. That was fine, but we were going to get sick of that soon enough. But with a garden on the roof, we had something extra. There were potatoes, lettuce, beans, broccoli, carrots and turnips. There were a couple of things I didn’t recognise but guessed were edible.

  At one side there were two greenhouses. Inside we found tomato plants, cucumbers and peppers. One had chillies and something else I didn’t recognise.

  ‘This could last us for months,’ said Xiaofan. ‘With a bit of preparation and some care about how we use it and look after it, we could last indefinitely.’

  ‘We would still need to replenish things,’ I said. ‘And what about water and feed?’

  She opened a shed that was next to one of the greenhouses. Inside there were tools and packets of seeds for all sorts of plants, fruit and vegetables
as well as plant food, fertiliser and insecticides. There were also a few bags of compost to keep us going.

  ‘I can get us anything else we need,’ said Xiaofan. ‘Just name it and I will find a place that stocks it.’

  I was grinning from ear to ear. In amongst the carnage of the last two days, this tiny oasis in the middle of a ravaged city had given me hope. I was still clinging to the belief that we would be rescued at some point, as the government regained control, but now we had the means to survive until that happened.

  ‘I think we should move in here,’ said Xiaofan. ‘It’s a bigger flat and we’ve got all this. We can get out for a breath of fresh air and it would be easier to defend if we came under attack.’

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s do it now.’

  It took us three hours, just to move all the essentials from the old flat to the new one. By essentials I mean the food and anything that could have been used as a weapon. We also took all the pots and pans, cutlery, DVD’s and CD’s and anything else which would make life more bearable.

  In the other flats we had taken all the booze as well. When we were finished I counted forty bottles of wine, six bottles of whisky, nine of vodka and several others of varying types. There was also a few dozen bottles of beer and some cider. In one of the bottom flats, Xiaofan had found a bottle of champagne. It looked like a good one and she had put it in the fridge to chill.

  As I unpacked the last of the boxes from the old flat, I suddenly felt tired and drained.

  ‘What you need is a good soak,’ said Xiaofan.

  There was a nice bathroom down the hall and I imagined myself lying in the hot water for an hour or so.

  ‘I might just do that,’ I said.

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Xiaofan. ‘I have a surprise first.’

  ‘Another one?’ I said.

  She opened the fridge and pulled out the bottle of champagne which was now perfectly chilled.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said.