Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel

by James Carlson

  “Drag her out,” John told Sheena. “Quick.”

  As John crouched to grab the possibly dead woman’s arm, Sheena sprayed her CS, aiming it down the hall at where Raj was stood. The canister’s nozzle had become twisted however, and the jet of liquid went in almost completely the other direction, hitting John square in the face.

  “For fuck’s sake, you got me,” he yelled, already beginning to cough and squinting his eyes.

  Half-blind, he fumbled for the injured woman’s arm, grabbed it, took hold of Sheena, and pulled them both backwards out of the house. He then slammed the door shut between them and the crazed man inside. Another police car was just arriving in the road.

  “Oh shit, oh shit,” John panted and coughed, trying his best to compose himself.

  “I think she’s dead,” Sheena said, looking up at him for advice.

  “You’d better start CPR anyway,” he told her. “At least until LAS get here.”

  Kneeling in the blood-soaked grass, Sheena tilted the flaccid woman’s head back and opened her mouth. Just then, Kate’s eyes opened and she stared up at the female officer.

  “She’s alive,” Sheena cried, startled but extremely grateful.

  “What’s happening, mate?” asked the lone police officer, getting out of the newly arrived car.

  It was Jack, Sheena saw with an element of relief. He was a six foot five great lump of a man. Just the copper you wanted at your side when it all went pear-shaped.

  People were emerging from the houses all along the street now, eager to see what all the drama was about.

  “Get back in your houses,” John shouted as best he could at them. They ignored him. “Please, for your own safety, go back inside. We’ve got things under control.”

  As he was saying this, there was a scream from inside number seven.

  “Get back! Get back!” Danny could be heard shouting.

  “Are you alright here with her?” Jack asked Sheena.

  John, beside her, stunk of CS gas and was doubled over, practically bringing up his lungs. He wouldn’t be any use to anyone for the next few minutes.

  “Yeah, go,” Sheena told the tall officer.

  Jack ran over to the door of number seven, booted it open, and disappeared inside with his baton held ready.

  “More units,” John choked out the words into his radio, his eyes streaming so badly he couldn’t see a thing now. “X-ray, we need more units.”

  “John, I need an update,” the Skipper responded back.

  “It’s okay. You’re going to be alright,” Sheena tried to convince the woman she was now cradling in her lap.

  The injured Kate lifted her head slightly, enabling her to stare down at the mess of torn flesh and exposed ribs where her breasts had so recently been. The pain she was in was clearly evident from the agonised expression on her face. Despite this though, Sheena noticed that the woman’s breathing wasn’t laboured.

  “What the hell?” Sheena murmured to herself, as she realised now that what was left of the woman’s chest wasn’t even rising and falling at all.

  She stooped even lower, in order to place her ear just above the injured woman’s mouth and nose. Nothing. The woman wasn’t breathing. So how could she possibly have regained consciousness, Sheena wondered, her face knotted in confusion.

  Kate, her own expression still one of raging pain, reached up with a sudden strike and grabbed Sheena by the back of her neck. Though the officer tried to fight her, her strength was no match and the woman dragged her down, mauling her neck with bite after bite.

  In Raj, the foreign amoeboid cells had taken hours to assimilate his body fully, but in doing so, they had adapted. In Kate, their second human host, they had taken only minutes to perform the same feat. And now, just as Raj had, the woman craved raw meat with an uncontrollable hunger, her body desperately attempting to rebuild itself while the attacking alien cells killed off the majority of the tissue they came into contact with.

  With her larynx crushed, Sheena wasn’t even able to scream, as her throat erupted in an arcing plume of hot blood. Her eyes fixed in disbelief, she slumped forward, her face resting with a splat in the other woman’s open chest cavity. Kate’s face lost its expression of agony for a moment and instead became one of satisfied lust, as she greedily drank the torrent of blood that spewed into her mouth.

  So silent and ferocious had the attack been, that John, sat beside them, the heels of his palms pressed into his eyes and snot oozing from his nostrils, was completely oblivious to what had happened.

  “How’s she doing, Sheena?” he asked, still coughing pathetically. “Sheena?”

  There was a frenzied banging on the door of number nine now, as the crazed Raj beat it with a strength he would not normally have possessed, causing it to rattle violently in its frame.

  The ambulance arrived now, its crew simply abandoning their vehicle, blocking the road, along with the three police cars. Their eyes were immediately drawn to the scene of carnage on the front lawn. The men couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The woman lying on her back, whose grievous chest wound should have left her dead, was frenziedly gnawing on the neck of the female police officer slumped over her.

  As they ran over, the male officer, who had been rubbing his eyes, managed to open them and saw his partner’s blank, dead face looking back at him. Deeply disturbed at the sight of the other woman eating her, he began to drag himself away, in an uncoordinated thrashing of arms and legs.

  The paramedics simply stood where they were, not knowing how to respond. They were not trained for this. They had two seriously injured casualties, but how could they even begin to treat them when one was eating the other?

  It was then that the already ajar door of the house next door fully opened and out strode three more police officers.

  “Hey, get over here. Quick,” Shouted one of the paramedics at the men. “Your colleague needs your help.”

  The coppers looked over and responded, clambering over the partition hedge.

  “Sheena’s dead,” John blurted out at the other men, still not able to believe it himself. “That crazy bitch is eating her.”

  Spence, Danny, and Jack, made their way over and simply stood, watching the injured woman feed. The residents of the houses all around were continuing to emerge into the street, slowly drawing daringly nearer, with murmurs between them of disbelief.

  “Spence, you prick,” John shouted angrily, stunned by his colleague’s apathetic reaction. “Drag her off.”

  Spence turned to look at him now, a terrible hunger in his eyes, baring his teeth.

  “Spence? What the f...?”

  Spence’s attack was both sudden and devastating. John’s adrenaline levels were already dangerously high, and having seen the savage look in Spence’s eyes, he made an effort to defend himself, as the man fell on him. He instinctively knew he was fighting for his life and didn’t hold back, jabbing both thumbs deep into his fellow officer’s eyes. Though Spence roared with pain, as the delicate balls of gelatine burst free of their sockets, his attack didn’t lose momentum for even a heartbeat.

  As the paramedics simultaneously turned and ran in panic for the safety of their ambulance, Danny and Jack reacted, sprinting after them, bringing them down well short of them reaching the vehicle.

  Chapter 2

  Mustafa

  Muz woke to the sound of the house phone ringing in the living room downstairs. Rolling over, he peered at the glowing green numbers of the alarm clock next to his bed.

  “Seriously?” he moaned testily. It was half past three in the morning. Who the hell was calling at this time?

  The phone stopped ringing and he buried his head back in the pillow. Just as he was beginning to nod off again, the mobile beside the alarm clock started buzzing loudly against the surface of the wooden bedside table.

  “Shit,” he said, snatching up the phone and turning over to check his wife in the bed beside him. She was beginning to stir at the unwelcome sound.
Was she already beginning to show, he wondered, observing her normally flat, well-toned stomach.

  Blinking and rubbing his eyes in an effort to force them to focus, he read the illuminated screen of the phone. ‘IBO’, it read in bold black letters. Integrated Borough Operations, Colindale’s borough based control room.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he whispered.

  Why was work ringing him at this time? And on a rest day as well? He contemplated rejecting the call for a few seconds, even though he knew he shouldn’t. There was no point, he thought. They would only keep ringing, and if he turned the phone off, they would know and he would be in the shit when he went back into work.

  “This better be important,” he said on accepting the call, growling as quietly as he could.

  “Is that Mustafa Dogan?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Sorry to call you at this time, but we need you to come in to work ASAP,” said the police officer on the other end of the phone.

  “Are you for real?” Muz moaned as loudly as he dared.

  “There’s been a critical incident...”

  “Yeah, and? There’s a critical incident almost every other day. Why are you calling me?”

  Muz could hear the noise in the IBO office through the phone. It sounded as though the room was crowded with people all trying to talk over each other.

  “This is serious, really serious. We wouldn’t be calling people up otherwise. Just think of the money. It’s a nice little recall,” the officer said.

  “I can’t drive. I’ve been drinking,” Muz replied.

  It was a lie. He didn’t care about the money. He had just worked twelve days straight, due to having to attend court and aid warnings eating into his rest days.

  “How many have you had?”

  “Three pints.”

  “Is there anyone who can drive you in?” the IBO officer asked, sounding rightfully sceptical of what he was saying.

  “At half past three in the morning? You’ve got be joking. What’s happened anyway?” Muz wanted to know.

  “Look, don’t worry about the drink, just get yourself in.”

  “What? Are you telling me to drive anyway, even though I’ve had a drink?”

  “Unless you’re pissed out of your skull, we need you in.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Yeah. It’s a full force mobilisation.”

  “Shit... okay.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, we’re also calling up off duty officers from other boroughs and neighbouring forces,” the officer tried to placate him.

  “Yeah, I feel loads better.” Muz hung up. “I hate this job,” he said to the cat that had jumped onto the bed to see what the commotion was about. The animal blinked at him with blank eyes. All he wanted to know was whether or not he was about to be fed.

  Muz slipped from under the duvet as stealthily as he could manage and stumbled around the darkened bedroom, trying to find his uniform in the dirty clothes bin. He had only worn the trousers and shirt the one day for court and it sounded like there wasn’t time to iron a clean set.

  Stubbing his toe hard against the corner of the dressing table, he hissed through his clenched teeth.

  “What are you doing?” Farah, his wife, asked, as she propped herself up on her elbows.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” Muz apologised. He was in for an ear full now.

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “Work. They’re calling everyone in. I’ve got to go.”

  “I’m sick of this,” Farah said angrily, fully awake now. “They can’t treat you like this. They don’t care about you as people, or the fact that you’ve got families.”

  Muz dressed even more hurriedly. The last thing he needed right now, was another lecture about how his job was ruining their marriage and alienating him from his daughter.

  “I’m going to write a letter to the Borough Commander about this,” she called after him, as he trod moodily down the stairs and put on his boots.

  “Bye,” he called up the stairs, opening the front door. “I love you.”

  “We’re going to talk about this when you get back. Whenever that might be,” Farah shouted back.

  Muz shut the door and sighed to himself.

  Driving south down the A1 from Stevenage, he saw all but a handful of other vehicles on the road.

  Why was Farah like that with him, he asked himself. She knew it wasn’t his fault. He did understand her frustration. The job got to him a lot of the time too, but the fact was that he worked for an emergency service and this sort of thing came with the warrant card. He moaned a lot, both at work to his mates and at home, as did all coppers, but if the truth were known, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else for a living. Even only after the four and a bit years he had in the job, it was simply who he was now. Farah however, would see him quit tomorrow. It was a long ongoing issue between them and he knew that if they couldn’t resolve it, it would eventually tear them apart.

  As he passed through the Hatfield tunnel, he was disturbed from his thoughts by the sight of blue lights bearing down on him in his rear-view mirror. Moving over into the left-hand lane, he was passed by three Hertfordshire police carriers, travelling in tight convoy at about 90 miles per hour. The din of their sirens was amplified to an intolerable wail by the arcing wall of the tunnel.

  Where were they going in such a hurry, Muz wondered. Then the realisation struck him. Had all those officers been called to Colindale as well? As his concerns grew for what awaited him when he got to the nick, he accelerated to well above the speed limit.

  Colindale police station was a modern, three-storey building with a welcoming ground floor glass frontage, situated on a bend in Grahame Park Way. Although Muz had been working here for the past five years, he had never seen it even close to being as busy as this. Normally at this time of night, as there was no civilian office staff working, he would have been allowed to park in the station’s rear yard. There would be no chance of that now though, he realised before he even got to the station.

  Both sides of Grahame Park Way were lined with parked vehicles: ambulances, TSG carriers, police mini-buses, dog vans, the three Herts carriers he had seen on the way in, and civilian cars belonging to all the officers who had apparently also been called into work. There were even two impressive looking Jankels, four by four armoured police trucks, parked between the trees on the area of rough ground just opposite the nick. What worried him the most however were the News vans, belonging to three separate networks. Whatever was happening really was a big deal then.

  Doubling back on himself, he finally found a tight spot to park, about four hundred metres back up the road. As he walked past the front office entrance to the side gate, he glimpsed the Station Reception Officers manning the desk. All three of them looked more than a little flustered at being inundated by crowding members of the Press.

  He swiped his warrant card to gain access to the building, through the private side door and was immediately surprised at the commotion within. Normally, at a quarter past four in the morning, the building would be almost vacant, except for the officers in the IBO office and custody. That was far from the case now. The corridors were thronged with people of all ranks, both in uniform and plain clothes. The majority were stood in tightly gathered groups, talking animatedly over each other. A few others weaved busily through them, making their way hurriedly from one office to another.

  “Muz,” someone called over the din.

  It was a Sergeant from his team, John Sparks. The man could not normally be flustered, but right now, he looked positively panicked.

  “Sarge’, what’s going on?” Muz asked.

  “Are you level two public order trained?” Sparks asked.

  “No, just level three now,” Muz informed him.

  He had let his higher level of training lapse after the birth of his daughter, because Farah had been scared to death by his stories of the degrees of violence he ha
d seen at public order events. She had told him that it was unfair on her and the child to put himself in such danger.

  “Shit,” said the Skipper, looking at a list he was holding in his hand. “Okay, get all your PPE kit on and get up to the briefing room. There’s going to be another briefing in about five minutes.”

  With that, the Sergeant pressed through the crowded passage, calling after someone else. Still none the wiser as to what this was all about, Muz went to the locker room and put on his personal protection equipment: his met-vest and radio, and his belt with his baton, cuffs and CS spray. He had an unnerving feeling that he might be needing them more than any day in the job so far.

  The briefing room was literally rammed. Every chair was taken and people standing filled the rest of the free space. Among the crowd, there were officers who had made a career from sitting behind a desk and hadn’t been on the streets in years. Their faces were a mixture of resentment and nervousness at having been called into work like this along with everyone else. The worry in their eyes at the prospect of having once again to perform the basic role of a police officer was clearly evident.

  Muz didn’t even recognise half the faces in the room, and the numbers on their epaulettes showed many of them to be from other boroughs. The noise was raucous, as everyone was asking everyone else what was happening and no one seemed to have an answer.

  “There’s a riot,” he heard someone say amid the general babbling.

  “...local officers killed already.”

  “...needed for containment but the cordons aren’t...”

  “Chief Inspector Ops is having a shit fit, ‘cos no one thought to...”

  “Mate, can you believe all this?” Kieran, a lad from his own team, said to him. “The shit has proper hit the fan.”

  “Right, shut up and listen,” a voice shouted above the din. It was Superintendent Lake, a stern man on a good day.

  The room fell almost immediately silent and everyone’s attention was focused on him, waiting to be given some clue as to why they were all there.