Necropolis (Necropolis Trilogy Book 3)

by Sean Deville

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held at a red light. We don’t know the whole story yet, but from what we know, there is major rioting in London, and all travel to the capital has been temporarily suspended. When we get more information, I will let you know.” The train staff were as in the dark as everyone else, not told the truth by people who themselves hardly believed it. And as the minutes ticked by, the passengers on the train became ever more agitated, she amongst them.

  So initially, she had sat oblivious to the virus, her phone out of signal range. A phone was a phone in her eyes, not a device for controlling satellites or calculating your own Body Mass Index. A true Luddite, she still had the old Nokia that had served her faithfully for the last seven years, and she wasn’t in any great hurry to replace it. She despised “Smart” phones and saw them as anything but, dumbing down whole generations, creating an army of moronic social media addicts. Hell, she still owned a pager.

  Eventually, she became tired of sitting around and went in search of news. First class was supposed to provide some sort of at seat service, but she hadn’t seen anyone for almost forty minutes. So she had risen her immense bulk wearily from her seat and walked towards the buffet car. It was on this journey that she had learnt the truth of what was occurring. She learnt of the death of the Prime Minister and of the pathogen that had been unleashed upon a now caffeine deficient populous.

  The train hadn’t moved from that point, and it clearly wasn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Looking out of the windows, she saw nothing but fields and livestock and dark clouds in the distance portending storms and rain that would soak one through to the bone. In shock at what she heard and saw from those around her, she had collapsed her obese frame into a seat in the economy section. There she shivered in fear and listened to those around her slowly fall to pieces mentally. What seemed like several hours later, the voice came over the tannoy again. Some men from the carriage had gone off to find train staff, but the staff had hidden behind the locked doors in the secure part of the train. How was one supposed to react upon learning of the greatest plague known to humanity?

  “We have been informed that all rail travel has been permanently cancelled,” a tear-filled voice said. “We have been told to wait it out and have been…have been informed we will be kept up to date.” When the conductor had finally appeared in her carriage, he had been bombarded with questions and threats of violence. It was then that they learned that the train really wasn’t going anywhere, because the driver had fled. The conductor, a rather large muscular fellow who could clearly handle himself, had merely barged through the crowd. His purpose? To unlock the doors with his key.

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do. We are all leaving and heading back up the track to Leicester. I suggest you follow us.”

  Like everyone else, Hazel had chosen to go with the train staff, and it had been that decision that had led to her still being here two days later. With no platform, she’d had to jump down from the train, and with no-one gallant enough to help her, she had lost her footing and landed harshly. She could swear, even now, that she had heard her ankle snap. In the Hollywood movies that her now-deceased husband had enjoyed, this was the moment when the hero stepped forward to offer assistance. But there were no heroes here, not today. Of the fifty or so passengers on the train, very few offered any kind of assistance. Hazel was a large lady, and assisting her would be a monumental struggle, even for someone as big as the conductor. So the decision was made to leave her and “send help back.” Whilst there were volunteers to help her back onto the train and into the nearest carriage, that was as far as the help went. There were some women who tried to insist that the men help her, give her some sort of chance, but they ignored the pleas. One man even told them to “shut the fuck up, bitches.” Then the reality dawned on those who had come to her defence, there was no way they could help her. She was left in agony with a crate of bar snacks, a palate of water and what amounted to an embarrassed shrug.

  Being a doctor, she had done her best to reverse the damage done to her ankle. And although she had managed several trips to the bathroom, she knew venturing from the train wasn’t an option. She was well and truly trapped. Now it was two days later, and she sat in her own stink, knowing that help wasn’t coming, that it would never come. But something else was, and she was startled from sleep by the sound of hands beating madly on the window next to her sleeping head. Her eyes jerked open and she saw the bloody palm prints on the glass. Craning her neck, she looked out of the window. There were hundreds of them. Most of them swarmed past the carriages like locusts, but several had sensed her, and knew that she was theirs. The doors were locked, and she had been left with the key, but there were other ways to gain access to the train.

  Hazel knew that this was the end of her, knew it when the first rock hit the window, then the second, then a sustained assault as the glass gradually cracked and shattered. Then the hands were clawing, bodies boosted with support from their brethren. Within minutes, despite her screams, and perhaps encouraged by them, the first infected was in, then the second. The first looked at her, silently measuring her up, then took a step, and then another. More windows were assaulted, and she cowered in her seat and heard the words not often heard in those early days of the outbreak. She was a ripe choice and no mistake, and without any further hesitation, the carriage invaders were upon her.

  “Feeeeeeed,” came the roar from a thousand deranged minds. For once, the collective let them have their reward.

  07.16AM, 18th September 2015, London Underground, London

  Rachel, she had been called Rachel. And now, she commanded the dead. Surrounded by her kind, she waited for instinct to tell her the next move to make. Despite her heart no longer beating and her lungs no longer inhaling, memory and consciousness returned to the once-deceased brain. She was one of four. What was it Fabrice had called her? A Horseman? She still didn’t know what that meant, her mind still only able to formulate rudimentary understanding of the old language.

  Even the memories meant little to her, just random firings in the neurons that were now more virus than human, the inside of her damaged skull reknitting itself into a new form of life. She had a vague sense of why she was here, felt the danger that was present in the world above, and called those who had passed and resurrected to join her in the deepest recesses of the London Underground system. And they followed her commands without question, without hesitation. What they hid from, she couldn’t say, but the threat was real and she would protect her kind from the worst of it.

  By her side stood the one whose power grew with every moment. If he wanted, Rasheed could bring the whole tunnel down upon her, cratering the streets above, whole buildings collapsing into the ground as it shifted. That wasn’t even the extent of his power. But Rasheed did nothing, because he was dead and was now merely a tool for her to use. There was no thought within his deceased brain, just the fire of devastating carnage, which Rachel knew she would have him unleash as the days progressed. But now, they waited.

  And still, the undead gathered in their thousands. They filled the tunnels and spread out through the tube network, filling the stations and the ticket halls as they pushed themselves below ground. Above ground, they now ignored the living and the infected, their hunger temporarily abandoned for reasons they couldn’t even articulate. The hunger was still present, it would always be present, but Rachel forced them to abstain from the hunt. Rachel controlled them, and she sent them to wander through the blackness of the underworld, so as to make room for more that followed.

  Their sheer numbers meant that the undead feet routinely hit the live rail, but the electricity did little to the dead, except perhaps to make them dance and smoke. Once they detached from the rail, they continued on their quest to reach the ends of the network, but always to remain underground. By the start of day three of the infection, nearly four hundred thousand zombies had made the deepest darkest tunnels of London’s subterranean transpor
t system their temporary home.

  The rats had fled. Due to feeding on viral-laced carcasses, most of them were now infected. Not possessing higher brain functions just like other infected animals, they were not tapped into the global consciousness. It was just meaningless noise to them, and they attacked their own and anything else they could encounter. But they retained their primal instincts, and they knew that the undead were to be avoided. Whilst the rats were no threat to a walking corpse, the undead were a danger to everything and would try to eat anything that dared be caught in those dead clasping fingers. So the rats left the safety of the London Underground network where the majority of the undead now resided, and took the contagion to the streets.

  Rats were the perfect species for this new task. They could worm their way through the smallest of gaps, and where the gaps did not exist, they could create them, gnawing through wood and concrete. Individually, they were a menace, but in packs, they were deadly, and stripped of their fear of humanity, they went after anything they could find. As Robert found to his cost.

  Robert lived by another name as most people with an online presence did. Jez453Ihatecars was the name he used on a host of social media, as well as his now infamous YouTube channel. His had been the first video of the infected. On the morning of September the 16th, he’d had 240 subscribers to his channel, a poorly edited and biased series of videos displaying the utter evils of the London motorist. He was not averse to getting into an altercation with someone HE felt was in the wrong, especially if it made good viewing. What he failed to realise that his whiny voice and obstinate attitude obtained him more dislike than likes. At least before the tragedy. The last time he had checked his channel before the internet went down, he found he had two hundred and forty million subscribers. Even with the fact the world had ended, he still felt elated at what hadn’t even been a dream. His ego screamed recognition and acceptance.

  The video taken from his helmet cam had gone viral with over a billion views. News channels across the world, safe in the knowledge that there would never be a copyright claim from him, played the video constantly. It had simply gone worldwide, and had spread through the ether of the internet faster than the apocalypse it depicted. It was all meaningless now of course, but the adulation and the praise he had received in the comments section had made him feel, momentarily, like the most significant person on the planet.

  And then the internet failed, at least for him. The power had also cut out about an hour ago, and he sat in his bedroom, cricket bat on the bed next to him, waiting for daylight to fully force its presence upon the world. He cut a pitiful figure, the room reeking from his own stink. Having not slept or eaten anything of substance since the truth of what was happening dawned on him, he looked like a man lost to the world. Robert should have kept on cycling, making his way out of the city instead of retreating to his flat to upload his new treasure.

  All last night he had heard them in the streets outside. And yesterday the screams had erupted from behind the walls that separated his bedroom from the flat next door. Those screams had been proceeded by the breaking of things, and it was pretty obvious that the infected had forced their way into attack whoever lived there. For five years, he had on occasion been less than a metre from that person, and yet to date, he had never met her. Robert found himself wondering what she looked like but knew he would not miss the almost crazed-like moans she made when in the throes of passion, which had recently been a nightly occurrence.

  As belligerent as he was when faced with those who broke the rules of the road, he was a shy person on all other occasions. He was also not up to the task of dealing with the gruff, often violent and arrogant London drivers, and many a time he had come off worse in various altercations. All displayed on video, of course. Occasionally, the police investigated the video evidence he handed to them, but most of the time they ignored it. They had better things to do than look into the complaints of someone, who according to the majority, was courting trouble.

  Robert was also not up to the task that would very shortly present to him. An hour earlier, he had been forced to use the lavatory and was relieved to see that the water still worked. Upon leaving the bathroom, he had put the toilet seat down, something that an overbearing mother had instilled into him from his earliest years. In fact, so indoctrinating had she been, he still sat down to do his business even to this day. But he always closed the lid, as if that was some form of defiance. Out of his eyesight, that lid now moved.

  Despite modern plumbing, rats were still capable of navigating the human-made maze that was their waste disposal system, especially in the older London houses. Not having a great job, Robert’s present residence didn’t even have double glazing or central heating, but merely matched what funds would allow. In another part of the city, he would have lived in relative luxury for what he was paying what was a borderline slum landlord. Instead of protesting, he settled for his lot, knowing that his flat would be readily occupied should he decide to leave, the landlord experiencing no real loss in income. And it was that very flat that was about to gain several new residents, neither of whom were willing to pay rent.

  The black shape slithered out of the toilet and onto the bathroom floor. It smelt the air and waited for its friends to arrive. The virus burned within its fevered mind, and it twitched as another shape landed beside it. The two rats looked at each other, fury burning within them, the need to feed destroying everything they were. Within seconds, three more shapes joined them, and as a unit, they moved out through the open bathroom door into the dirty carpeted corridor, a path of dampness being left in their wake on the thread-bear beige carpet. They could almost feel the human’s heartbeat. They could almost taste its delicious and nutritious blood.

  Robert saw them almost instantly. All five of them stood in the doorway of his bedroom, which was only big enough to contain the double bed and a few dilapidated items of furniture.

  “Fuck.” That was the first word he had said out loud in almost 2 days, and it would be his last. These rats were fast, and working together, they shot across the space between them and the bed. Robert screamed, a pathetic mewling sound that only seemed to excite the rats. Unseen by him, more were pouring out of the toilet, eager to join their brothers in the feast that was to ensue, beckoned by those who had led the way. The first rat, the pioneer who had found this new land, leapt onto the bed covers, its claws gripping the flimsy material. If Robert had been beneath his duvet, he could have wrapped himself up as some kind of defence. But such a shield would have given only temporary respite. As it was, the rat paused for a second, and spotting the human clutching for the cumbersome weapon at hand, jumped. Rats can jump four feet, and this one landed with ease on Robert’s chest, its sharp little talons enmeshing themselves in the clothes he hadn’t changed from two days before. Without taking pause, it bit down into the flesh of his almost emaciated chest, easily penetrating the material.

  It was quickly joined by three of the other rats, the fifth momentarily distracted by the sounds of dozens of its kind running towards the room. As Robert struggled to fight off the biting, tearing creatures, a small army of them washed into his room like a tsunami. A rat hit their mass, flung by a desperate man who was now lost to terror and panic. The flung rate recovered quickly and joined the throng as they swarmed onto the bed and onto the now-thrashing body that was to be the best meal some of them had found in days. Robert died on that bed, and resurrected with several rats tunnelling into his insides. Knowing what that meant, the rats then quickly fled to find their next meal.

  08.03AM, 18th September 2015, Hounslow West, London

  Despite almost being raped and probably murdered in the last house he had shored up in, Kirk had risked it again. He didn’t really have a choice in the matter. The day had been cold, and despite the fact that the infected seemed to have no interest in him still, he did not feel safe out on the open streets during day or night. So for the time being, he had found himself another residence to hide
in, and despite it being still early in the day, he had fallen asleep in the double bed upstairs, the anguish and the turmoil of the previous days finally catching up to him. His last act had been to push a wardrobe in front of the bedroom door before he had collapsed onto what had been freshly laundered sheets.

  He awoke to a world as quiet as he had ever known it. He was trapped in a foreign land, trapped amongst demons and the damned alike. He knew there would still be hundreds of frightened, cowering individuals in the buildings surrounding his location, but after last night’s trauma, he had no wish to encounter any of them. Humanity could go and fuck itself. Who here could he now trust? To think that if he’d gone straight home to Australia after signing the contract, he would be in his wife’s arms now, safe and away from this madness. Instead, he had partied and had taken some diseased slapper to his bed only to wake up to a country that had suffered a fatal wound. It was, without a doubt, the most idiotic and foolish decision of his life.

  Kirk looked at his watch and confusion hit him. How could that be possible? His watch told him it was the eighteenth, which meant he had slept all through yesterday. The suffering of what had occurred had obviously ripped the energy from his body, and his mind had done the only thing it could do in the circumstances. It had shut itself down, better that than facing the litany of horrors that had been presented to it.

  Crawling from the bed, he for the first time noticed his own body odour, and he stumbled into the bedrooms en-suit bathroom. Water still flowed from the tap, and he drank heavily, taking almost a dozen deep gulps with his lips under the running faucet. He stripped off his clothes and ran the shower, almost surprised to feel the water still warm. Off in another part of the house, he heard the boiler hum to life. Realising this might be the last chance he had to feel like a human being, he stepped under the water, letting it massage his scalp and his shoulders, feeling pleasure that had eluded him of late. He almost felt safe again.