As he was desperately trying to decide what to do, he failed to notice the woman slump forward, her head resting limply against her breastbone and her hands slapping the pavement, all signs of life gone.
Simply dragging the woman through the streets wasn’t an option, he thought. It would cause untold damage to her legs. He could risk going back to the ambulance, to find a way to get the gurney out the back, he considered. Then he could easily wheel her along. That would slow him down considerably however. Also, should the two of them come under attack from any more people suffering from this spread of psychotic dementia, he would be morally obligated to stand his ground and defend her. That would not be a good situation to be in.
Maybe he would be better off leaving her here. Obviously not just leaving her sitting in the street, but get her into a house, as a place of relative safety, and come back for her later with back-up. Yes, though it felt like he would be abandoning the woman, this appeared to be his best option.
Behind him, the woman uttered a low moan and he turned to regard her. Her complexion had changed dramatically, her face now a pallid yellow-grey. Her unblinking eyes, filled with hunger, looked back at him and a trail of drool began to trickle down her chin. She reached out towards Muz with grasping hands, her previous frailty now gone. Muz felt a cold shudder course down his spine.
It looked as though she was about to start dragging herself towards him, but instead, turned her head down to regard her bloated stomach. The baby inside her was kicking and she contemplated the sensation with the almost comical uncomprehending fascination of a dog caught out by one of its own farts. Baring her teeth, she gripped the fabric of her nightdress and ripped it open, revealing her naked body. Without a second’s hesitation, she then began to claw at herself, her nails raking at her swollen belly. Testament to her newfound strength, she rapidly tore into the skin, blood coursing out of the wounds and pooling in her lap.
“No…” was all Muz could say, stunned by the woman’s intense self-mutilation.
He ran a few steps over to her, planning to pin her down, but she shot him a look so terrifying it stopped him in his tracks. She gnashed her teeth at him momentarily then returned to her effort to tear herself open. All Muz felt able to do now was stand and bear witness to this sick scene.
The woman’s fingers were soon deep within the gouge she had managed to open up, and then with a scream of agony and the sound of ripping flesh, her stomach burst open. Even more blood and now amniotic fluid flooded around where she was seated, as she lifted from within her gaping abdominal cavity the writhing form of her baby.
Torn from the warmth and security of its mother’s womb, the newborn squealed shrilly with the full strength of his tiny lungs. Already, he managed to open his little eyes, and squinting against his first sight of the rising sun, stared up at his mother’s face - just as she lifted him to her mouth and bit viciously into his plump round belly.
The baby’s screeching became even more unbearably high in pitch but the mother, showing absolutely no maternal concern, continued to feast on his just ripe flesh. Although completely new to the world and already suffering unimaginable agony, the baby was grasping at his mother’s face with his stubby fat hands, as she crunched through his fragile ribs. With a rabid ferocity, the baby now attacked his mother, attempting to chew off her nose with his wet, gummy mouth.
Muz’s backed away, the image of what he was seeing burning itself indelibly into his memory, threatening to haunt his nightmares for years to come, should he manage to survive and escape the ensuing horror.
Well, that solved the problem of taking care of the woman, he thought with the macabre sense of humour, which served police officers as a necessary defence against the horrors they saw on a regular basis. At the same time, he doubled over and vomited over the toes of his well-polished shoes, feeling himself again shaking in shock.
“Sam?” he called up over his radio, still tuned to the IBO channel.
“Go on, mate,” the disembodied voice of his colleague replied.
“What in God’s name is going on down here?” Muz demanded to know. “I’ve just watched a woman rip her unborn baby out of her stomach and eat it.”
There was a pause then Muz’s radio beeped, indicating he was receiving a private call.
“Go on, Sam,” he responded.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to talk on an open channel,” the female officer apologised. “The fact is, I’ve got top brass running around in the office around me and even they don’t seem to know what’s caused all this.”
“Great.”
“Were you being serious about that woman,” Sam asked.
“Yeah. I puked,” Muz admitted.
“Shit. Are you on your way back here then?”
“Damn right I am. I’ll see you soon.”
“Good luck, mate,” Sam said and Muz ended the call.
Disregarding the woman and her poor child as clearly being a lost cause, he looked down the hill, intending to continue heading in that direction, back towards Colindale police station. Heading up the long stretch of the road towards him however, he could see a gang of youths. They looked like the usual worthless scum that hung around the parade of shops a couple of streets over from here.
Behaving more like a pack of dogs than usual, snapping and snarling at each other, they were coming this way. Despite the distance, they had already seen Muz.
Observing their advance for a moment, he saw that they suffered various injuries, evident from their blood-stained clothes and broken, lurching gaits. A boy of about twelve years was causing a loud grating sound, as with one foot missing, he walked on exposed bone, scraping the end of his leg against the tarmac surface of the road.
One of lads at the front of the group of about fifteen boys and girls broke into a run and the others immediately followed suit. Despite his terrible injury, even the boy with the missing foot was frighteningly fast, sprinting rapidly up the hill in a series of off-balance lunges, hissing through clenched teeth at the excruciating pain.
“Oh shit,” Muz gasped.
To his right, behind the railings where the woman sat feeding, there was a cut-through between the houses, a footpath that led to the adjacent street. Breaking into a run, Muz passed the woman who snarled at him and held what remained of her baby possessively close to her chest.
He had barely got half way along the path though when he saw, in the next road, a brawling mass of people. They were gathered around a slowly rolling car, dragging the driver and passengers out of their seats. The man who had been in the driver’s seat was lashing out at the crowd with his fists, vainly trying to defend his nine year old twin daughters, who were screaming as they were pulled through the windows by clawing hands.
“Bollocks,” Muz said and turned on his heels.
Rapidly doubling back on himself, he passed the infant eating woman again. Though Muz tried hard not to look at her, he couldn’t stop himself, throwing a sideways glance her way. Her nose was reddened and swollen from where her baby had been frenziedly gnawing on it with his toothless mouth. Although the mother had eaten all the way through her son’s plump belly to the spine, he was still conscious, waving his fat little arms and squealing.
Turning eyes away in disgust, Muz saw the youths were very close now, no more than fifty metres down the hill. Still, they seemed unfazed by their wounds and showed no signs of beginning to tire. There was no way he could outrun them, he knew. Starting to panic, he ran to the front door of the nearest house and tried the handle. It was locked. Clambering over the low wall between this and the next house, he tried again. Thankfully, this time the door swung inwards and he threw himself inside, slamming the door in place behind him.
There was no key in the lock, he realised despondently, as he heard a clatter of feet and the snarling of the youths outside. Pressing his back to the door, he leaned over to the adjacent window and twitched the net curtain aside. The gang of kids ran past the gate to this house and converged on t
he woman a little further along. He heard her crying out in pain, as the savage group tore into her. Muz felt almost nothing for her, so overwhelmed was he by the relief that the youths had passed him by.
Crouching low, so as not to be spotted through the windows, he moved towards the rear of the house where he was less likely to be seen from the road outside. As he warily shuffled through the hall to the kitchen, he listened intently for any telltale sounds of there being anyone else in the house with him.
“Hello?” he dared to call out softly, his voice trembling.
Why had the front door been unlocked if there was no one home, he wondered. Maybe whoever had been in the building had heard the riot going on outside, had walked out into the street, to see what had been happening and that had been the end of them.
In the kitchen, he found a landline telephone attached to the wall. Though he had turned the volume of his personal radio down as low as it would go, he could still just about hear the constant panicked transmissions, officers pleading for help. He needed to speak to someone back at the control centre for more than a few seconds, without being cut off by yet another emergency transmission. Reaching up from his squatting position, he snatched the phone receiver from its housing and pressed the ‘nine’ button repeatedly.
“Which service do you require?” he heard a voice say over the line.
“Police,” he whispered.
“You’ll have to speak up, sir.”
“Police,” he said again with an insistent hissing growl.
There was a short pause, which seemed to drag on to Muz, as he peered through the door to the living room and scanned it for signs of life.
“Police operator. How can I help?”
“This is PC Dogan, Six Two One Sierra X-ray,” Muz responded hurriedly. “I’m caught up in the riot, or whatever the hell is going on, in Mill Hill. I’m on Engel Park and I need urgent assistance, as many units as possible.”
He could hear the operator speaking to a colleague but it was difficult to pick out what she was saying, as she’d covered her mike with a hand.
“It’s another officer inside the cordon,” was all he managed to make out. After what seemed like a lengthy exchange between her and the other operator, she removed her hand and spoke to Muz again.
“All I can suggest, PC Dogan, is that you get out of the cordon area, if you can. The situation is totally out of control at your location.”
“Really?” Muz replied sarcastically.
“The cordons in that area have been abandoned and breached, and new cordon positions have been expanded much further out. You need to try and get to your nearest manned station,” the woman told him.
“Yeah, I already tried that. Didn’t get very far. I need a Trojan unit or someone to come and extract me,” Muz demanded.
The operator sighed into her end of the phone.
“So should I stay put and wait for help?” Muz asked.
“We simply don’t have the necessary resources available to…” the infuriatingly calm woman began to say in her matter-of-fact tone of voice.
Muz’s attention was suddenly focused elsewhere however and he lowered the phone from his ear. He could have sworn that he had heard something inside the house, the faint click of the front door handle being used maybe, followed by the soft thud of the door swinging open and stopping when it hit the wall in the hallway.
The operator was still chattering down the phone and Muz became afraid that even such a faint whisper might give him away. Pressing the ‘off’ button, he placed the handset on the kitchen work surface as carefully as he could.
He waited there for a good minute, squatting in the corner by the sink, his faced screwed up in concentration, as he tried to listen over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears. Just as he decided he must have imagined the sound, there came a low, menacing growl from the hallway.
“Oh shit,” Muz whispered, the words coming from his mouth before he could stop them.
Scuttling as quickly as he could through the doorway to the living room, he tugged open the patio doors and escaped into the garden. Standing on the lawn, he stopped for a second and looked frantically around. A high wooden fence surrounded the garden on all three sides and there was no gate.
Making his way over to the rear fence, he stood on a half-chewed squeaky dog toy. The shrill squeal it emitted gave him a jolt of fright that was almost painful. His immediate response was to look over his shoulder back at the house. There he saw, through the patio doors, in the living room, the silhouette of a motionless figure. Framed by the bright light coming from the windows at the front of the house, the man stood staring at Muz and snarled.
His adrenal gland squirting every drop of fluid it contained into his bloodstream, Muz leapt at the garden fence with an agility he didn’t know he had. He clambered over the top and fell into a rose bush on the other side. Completely unaware of the thorns scratching at him, he got back to his feet, ran across this second garden and vaulted over a side fence. He did this again and again, through several gardens, not daring to waste time looking back. Eventually though, his lungs could take no more and he had to stop.
Bent double with his hands on his knees, he sucked in lungs full of air. He had assumed that he was alone in this garden but, lifting his head, he realised otherwise. A lean, muscular Staffordshire bull terrier was stood on the decking by the house, staring at him with intensely vivid eyes. Muz froze with newfound fear but the dog only looked at him for a second or two, before it instinctively dismissed him as being no threat.
The animal turned its attention back to the patio window and stood up on its hind legs. It scrabbled frantically at the glass with its front paws, as it had been doing before Muz had startled it. The dog whimpered pitifully as it did so, desperate to get into the house.
No longer afraid that the dog might be about to attack him, Muz ventured towards it, to get a look through the patio doors at just what had got it so worked up. In the living room, the dog’s owner, a man in his early twenties, was fighting off a gang of assailants. His baggy-fit jeans had fallen around his ankles and he was doing all he could not to fall over them, while swinging wildly at the others in the room with a heavy lamp stand.
Trying to shuffle his way backwards to the sliding doors, so he could let his dog in, he didn’t look where he was going and tripped over an Abs-Blaster sit-ups machine. He had barely even hit the floor when the group were on him, sinking their teeth deep into the skinny white meat of his bare legs. Screaming, eyes wide with the pain, the man tried to drag himself closer to the dog and reach for the handle.
Muz considered opening the door and letting the dog into the house. One of the crazed attackers suddenly noticed him watching them however, and from his crouched position, lunged at him. It was as though the mad man hadn’t been aware that there was a window between himself and Muz, and he slammed face first into the pane with such force that even the dog leapt back in fright.
The madman looked quizzically at the window, which now bore his greasy face print, then snarled and ran at it again. With a head butt that shuddered the frame, cracks spread immediately from the point of impact along the glass.
Muz didn’t wait around to see if this psycho’, using his head as a battering ram, was actually going to manage to break through. He left the dog to bark frantically while running in circles and dragged himself over the next fence. He again put several gardens between himself and the danger, before giving in to the burning in his lungs.
The garden in which he now found himself was heavily overgrown. The grass of the lawn was at least a foot and a half deep and interspersed with dock leaves and dandelions. The bushes, which should have formed a neat perimeter, were so out of control that they threatened to take over.
Pressing his hands against the glass of the living room window and peering into the gloom of darkened room, Muz was able to make out the bulky figure of a heavily obese woman. She was stood by the front window, nervously looking through a gap
in the closed curtains.
Muz banged on the window with a fist, to get her attention. The woman almost ripped the curtain from its rail, when she jumped at the sudden noise. She turned to face Muz and he beckoned her over to him. The fat woman didn’t move, her eyes wide with fear, her breathing rapid and laboured.
“Let me in,” Muz called through the glass.
The woman shook her head, causing her chins to wobble.
“I’m a police officer. Let me in,” Muz demanded, pointing at the word ‘police’ clearly printed on the chest of his stab-proof vest.
After an indecisive pause, the terrified woman began to walk over towards him. At that very moment however, the front window came crashing in and a body fell into the room, amid a mess of torn curtains and shattered glass. The fat woman lifted her podgy hands to her face and screamed with the incredible lung capacity of an opera singer. The seemingly endless shriek only increased in pitch, as the human projectile fought her way out of the pile of curtains and got to her feet. Shards of glass protruded from the skinny Chinese woman’s torso and limbs but she seemed completely unfazed by her gruesome injuries, her eyes locked in hungry lust on the huge bulk of the fat woman. Then she lunged.
Though the larger woman was easily three times the mass of her attacker, she was able to put up little defence against the little oriental woman, who began feasting frenziedly on her rolls of fat.
Though he knew there was nothing he could do to help, Muz felt a greater sense of shame with each person he left to their fate. Standing on a rusty exercise bike that had long since been put in the garden and forgotten about, he clambered over the fence.
He found himself now back out on the street, the fat woman’s house having been the end of the row. Across the road and almost out of view around a bend to the left was a parade of shops, the sight of which helped him get his bearings. This was Salcombe Gardens and he was two roads over to the west from where Kieran had met his horrible death.
Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel Page 7