“This is terrible, just terrible,” the reporter said, genuine anguish in his voice. “Once again, for the benefit of those trapped within the containment area, who might be viewing this, the police advise you to stay at home. Lock all doors and windows, close curtains and blinds and stay away from the windows. If possible, stay in a room where you cannot be seen from outside and keep all noise to a minimum. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has stressed that help will come for you.
“If your home, or wherever you currently are, is no longer safe and you have no other option, you are advised to find another place of safety or failing this, make your way towards the borough borders, where you will be met by quarantine staff. This however – and I really cannot stress this enough – has proven extremely dangerous.”
No, Muz thought, he had to get back to the nick. He felt impotent stuck here and frankly embarrassed to be caught up in this. He should be helping at the cordons, assisting in the rescue efforts. He would just have to plan his route back very carefully. If he avoided areas of dense population, God willing, he would avoid the same fate as the man at Mill Hill Circus.
“There is a dedicated emergency helpline for those with family members or…” the reporter went on, as Muz heard a noise from an adjacent room and turned off the TV.
Holding his breath, so as to hear as best as he could, he leaned round the living room door and looked through the hall into the kitchen, from where the sound had come. There, with a sigh of relief, he saw Jenna going through the fridge. He had been so transfixed by the TV that he hadn’t even noticed her wander off.
The scrawny woman took a large block of cheese and started gnawing on it hungrily. The sickness she had suffered during the night had passed for the time being and she now felt half-starved.
She was able to sleep and eat? Muz couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t slept or eaten in well over thirty hours, and yet, he still did not feel hungry and despite his obvious fatigue, he was wide awake. That had to be the stress he was under, something which Jenna seemed to be coping with far better than he was. Seeing Muz watching her, she held out the orange block, offering it to him. He shook his head.
Leaving her to it, Muz returned to the living room and picked up the landline handset. Pressing the ‘on’ button, he was immensely grateful to hear a dial tone and punched in the numbers of his home phone. It rang and rang.
“Come on,” Muz growled.
“Hello?” his wife answered at last. Even from hearing just that single word, Muz could tell she had been crying.
“Farah, it’s me,” he said.
“Mustafa? Oh, thank God,” Farah gasped, starting to cry all over again. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
“Listen to me,” Muz said sternly. “I’m in the containment zone.”
“Oh God, no. It’s all over the news. There’s…”
“Baby, please try not to cry,” he begged her. “I spent the night safe in a house. I’m not injured. I’m okay.”
“What? Who’s house? Where? I’ll phone the police and get them to…” Farah began to babble.
“Honey, listen,” Muz cut her off. “I’m going to get out of here. I’m going to make my way to the cordons and get out. Okay?”
“Okay,” Farah said, trying so hard to take control of herself.
“Now, mum and dad are going to be worried too, so I need you to call them and tell them I’m okay,” Muz instructed.
“Okay,” Farah sniffled.
“I’m going to have to go now…”
“Oh Mustafa, please take care of yourself,” Farah begged.
“I will. I’ll see you soon,” Muz tried to convince her, putting as much conviction in his voice as he was able to muster.
“I’m so sorry for shouting at you when you left,” Farah wailed down the line, losing all composure.
“That’s okay, baby. It’s fine. I love you,” Muz said, the sound of his wife’s distress causing a tight lump to form in his throat again.
“I love you too.”
Muz hung up the phone and struggled to hold back the tears. He noticed Jenna now, watching him from the doorway. Her expression was one of deep sadness, which Muz took to be empathy for him and his wife. He was wrong. The expression on her face was born of self-pity. She had no one to phone, no real friends or family who might be wondering where she was right now.
“Right,” Muz said decisively. “Let’s get out of here. We need to stay off the streets as much as we can and avoid the epicentre, where this all started. I’m guessing that’s where the largest number of those cannibal psychos will be.”
After checking the garden from a rear window, the two of them stepped outside. The day was grey and cold and a heavy morning mist hung in the air.
“If I’ve still got my bearings and my knowledge of the ground is what it should be, these gardens should back onto Mill Hill Cemetery,” Muz said, more to himself than for Jenna’s benefit.
Jenna nodded, unable to speak with her mouth stuffed full of cheese.
“It was the early hours of the morning when this all kicked off,” Muz went on. “The gates to the cemetery would have been locked at the time and so probably still are. As far as I’m aware, the whole graveyard is surrounded by a high fence. From what I’ve seen of these deranged people, they no longer seem to have the mental co-ordination to figure out how to climb. So, the cemetery should be clear.”
Muz knew he could easily be wrong on any one of those points, but he needed to believe that the graveyard beyond this garden fence was safe, to give himself enough nerve to get going. He clambered onto and straddled the fence, peering into the misty gloom on the other side. He wasn’t able to see much at all, due to the heavy moisture in the air and the nearby line of trees. Having pulled Jenna up, they both dropped down onto the other side.
If there had been anyone in the cemetery, any noise they might have made was muted by the cloying vapour. Only the most local of sounds, which Muz and Jenna themselves made could be heard. Unable to see or hear for more than thirty feet all around them was unnerving.
The unlikely pair stooped, as they pushed their way through the densely set trees, being as careful as they could not to snap any branches. After only a few feet, they emerged from the wood line and trod tentatively between the numerous gravestones.
“We need to head to the northern end,” Muz whispered to Jenna, reluctant to break the dead silence that enveloped them. “When we get there, we can cut across to the other side of Milespit Hill. That’ll be a bit risky, but then it’ll be fields and trees, all the way to the far western end of Wise Lane. All being well, we shouldn’t bump into anyone.”
“I hope you know this area as well as you think you do,” Jenna grumbled quietly, all the while nervously scanning around herself with wide eyes.
So do I, Muz thought to himself.
They soon found themselves on one of the several intersecting roads that cut through these expansive grounds and decided to follow it. Their confidence began to grow, as there were no noises whatsoever to suggest there was anyone else in this enclosed graveyard with them, no one living anyway.
Passing row after row of headstones, they saw relatively new plots, with fresh flowers decorating many a grave. There were also plots so old they had clearly long since been forgotten and could barely even be seen, hidden as they were among the trees and brambles that had overwhelmed them.
“I don’t like this place,” Jenna stated flatly.
She was clearly beginning to suffer from withdrawal again, her face a sallow yellow. Wincing in pain, she clutched her stomach.
A rustling through the grass, just to their right, alerted them to something moving there and both their hearts began to pound in their chests. Muz tried to beckon Jenna away in the other direction but she wasn’t looking at him. She just stood there, her eyes transfixed on the long grass.
A cat broke the cover of the undergrowth and darted into the road. Jenna literally jumped, holding her hands up to her face. On
seeing them, the cat froze and stared back. It was clearly in a state of distress, arching its back, the fur down its spine and covering its tail standing on end. The tabby was only there a second, before it sprinted off for the safety of new cover.
Carrying on, they followed the road through this morbid place for so long that Muz began to wonder whether it looped around and they had been walking in a huge circle. At that point, however, the mist cleared a little. Up ahead, through the wooded area they were walking towards, and at the top of the hill, he saw the unmistakable green copper roof of Arkley Medical Research Facility. They were heading in the right direction after all.
“Okay, we need to make our way over to the left and…” Muz began to say.
Jenna however interrupted him by doubling over, bracing herself with her hands on her knees and vomiting up a puddle of bright orange, snotty, lumpy goo. She made a horrible retching sound, as her stomach heaved repeatedly.
There then came, from the gravestones to their right and just beyond the limit of view the mist afforded, a chilling moan. Muz stopped dead, not daring to move. This was no cat.
Equally as startled, Jenna lifted her head, a slippery orange tendril dangling from her chin, and cupped a hand over her mouth to stem any further vomiting. Muz glared intently at her, with a finger over his lips, and she looked back apologetically.
Barely daring to breathe, Muz franticly tried to assess exactly from where the sound had come. There came another pained moan. It was closer than the first had been, Muz realised. He grabbed Jenna by an arm and dragged her off, taking a route as far afield from the tormented cries as possible. He could feel the welling temptation in Jenna to run but he reined her in. If they ran, their footfalls would make too much noise on the road.
Desperately hoping that he still knew where he has going, Muz pulled Jenna into a wooded area and they wove as fast as they could through the undergrowth. Thick brambles, which came up to their thighs, snagged at their clothes and scratched their legs. He kept his ear cocked over his shoulder the whole time, trying to hear whether that chilling groan was following them.
They reached the edge of the trees and found themselves stepping out onto a road. The mist, it became apparent, had been confined to hovering above the moist fields of the cemetery and they could now see a fair distance in both directions.
Scanning both up the steep hill to the right and down to the left, they were grateful that there was not a single soul in sight. There was however, down by the entrance to the cemetery and at a junction, a police car, its blue lights still spinning, though very slowly as the battery was dying. Red and white cordon tape, which had been pulled across the road, was now broken and flapped in the weak breeze, hanging from the lampposts where it had been tied.
On the far side of the road, affluent-looking detached houses were set far back in their own grounds. Directly across from them though, there were no buildings, only another short stretch of wooded area, with a dirt path running through it.
Muz thought he heard the faint snap of a twig behind them. Someone was following them through the trees then, he decided. He frantically urged the reluctant Jenna out from the cover of the trees onto the open road.
“That path over there should lead onto the fields,” Muz said, already hurriedly making his way in that direction.
“But what about a car?” Jenna said, stopping in her tracks. “We’d be much safer in a locked car and we’d get to the police station a lot quicker.”
She began to walk down the hill towards the cars parked alongside the pavement.
“Are you serious?” Muz called after her in his loudest whisper. “What are the chances of finding a car with the keys in the ignition?”
“What about that police car?” Jenna asked over her shoulder, trying the car door handles as she walked past them.
She had a point, Muz was forced to concede. In whatever melee had taken place here, the officers that had abandoned that car may well have left the keys in the ignition in their panic. He broke into a trot to catch up with her.
As they neared the patrol car, he saw several items of police uniform strewn on the ground. There was a clip-on tie, covered in dirt. An epaulette hung from a bush. He couldn’t even hazard a guess as to who it belonged to, as two of the silver shoulder numbers were missing. Then, almost hidden underneath the marked car, he saw a police radio. As Jenna clambered into the empty vehicle, checking the ignition and the sun visor, he scrabbled under it and retrieved the radio.
“Shit,” Jenna said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Muz removed the battery from the discarded radio, placed it in his own and tried to turn it on. Nothing. It was completely flat. He slumped against the side of the car.
Assessing the scene here, the items of uniform, the broken tape, the abandoned car, it was easy to see that this cordon point had been just as ineffective as his own had been. He remembered what the reporter on the TV had said about new cordons encompassing a much broader area. He just hoped that they consisted of something more than plastic tape and officers who were simply not trained to deal with anything of this nature or scale.
“We can’t hang around,” he told Jenna dejectedly. “We need to get off the roads.”
She climbed out of the driver’s seat and began to walk further down the street.
“There must be at least one car…” she began to say but her words faltered, as she reached the junction and stared into the new road.
Watching her, the hair on the back of Muz’s neck stood on end.
“What’s wrong?” he asked but the woman didn’t respond.
Although his instincts told him to turn and run up the hill, he instead walked around the car and towards Jenna.
“Get back here,” he hissed.
As he reached her and took hold of her unbelievably fragile wrist, he too looked into the east end of Wise Lane. There he saw a male and female police officer, both fighting with each other, while picking over the remains of a dead child.
“Oh God, is that John and Sheena?” he asked rhetorically, his brain refusing to accept that he was seeing two good police officers, whom he knew well enough to chat to, committing this atrocious act.
Sheena was trying to feed, but the chunks of flesh, which she tore from one of the poor boy’s thighs, only fell through the gaping hole in her neck when she swallowed.
John was struggling even to swallow. The majority of the skin on one side of his face had been chewed off, including his lips and cheek, which meant the meat in his mouth kept slipping out. He had developed a technique however, of pushing the meat into his mouth and down his throat with a fist. He had been doing this, with such disregard for his own wellbeing that he had accidentally punched out his two upper front teeth. His stomach was so bloated that it bulged out from under the bottom of his stab vest. A couple of the lower buttons on his blood-soaked white shirt had popped off, with the strain of his incredibly engorged gut.
The fight between the two psychotic officers was completely one-sided. John was too slow from being so stuffed, moaning at the pain of his tearing innards, while Sheena possessed the speed, strength, and determination that came with her consuming starvation. As the pair clawed and snapped at each other, John’s eyes caught the two pieces of fresh meat observing them from back at the junction. He snarled and began to make his way towards them.
Seeing this, Muz stepped back in fear, while Jenna remained rooted in shock to the road. He needn’t have worried however. Sheena, having not seen her audience herself, took immediate advantage of John’s distraction. She bit firmly down on what to her, at that moment, was his most attractive feature, the huge bag of meat that was his stomach.
With her jaw clamped down, she tugged at him with the weight of her body behind her, pulling him off balance and tearing him open. The flesh, organs, fingers and toes of five different people spilled out onto the road and into the gutter. Sheena fell upon the mess of human pieces and returned to frenziedly trying to feed herself, while j
ohn floundered, dragging himself along the ground in an effort to reclaim some of his lost bounty.
Jenna was physically shaking now and Muz had to drag her away, back around the corner and out of view.
“Did you see that female officer?” Jenna stammered. “Her throat. How is she still standing?”
Muz continued to pull her away up the hill but she grabbed hold of his shoulders and stared imploringly into his eyes, tears streaming down her filthy cheeks.
“How is that possible?” she asked hysterically.
“I… I don’t know,” Muz said, feeling as equally stunned and disturbed as she clearly was.
Whatever it was that had affected all these people, it was more than just a mental condition, he now realised. Sheena was walking around with what was indisputably a mortal wound in her neck. What possible affliction could enable such a thing to happen?
Muz broke into a run, desperate to get back into cover. Jenna’s free arm flapped pathetically behind her, as he tugged her along in tow, back to the point where they had first emerged out onto the road. Finding the dirt track again, they ducked under the low branches, into the woods. Only when they re-emerged on the other side of the trees, into an un-mown field of common ground, did Muz respond to Jenna leaning back in protest, and slow back down to a walk.
Jenna wriggled her arm free grumpily and breathlessly looked around her. The mist that had haunted the cemetery was back, hanging heavy just above the long grass. The dirt path continued ahead of them through the field, meaning they didn’t have to get wet trudging through the dew-soaked grasses.
Working as a police officer rarely brought Muz to places such as this. It was therefore easy for him to forget just how many green areas there were here in north London, hidden from the view of the roads by houses and other buildings.
There were no animals to be seen or heard. Normally walking along through a common field such as this, with the woods gathered in close on either side, a person would disturb some fauna or other, causing it to at least be heard scurrying off through the undergrowth. Jenna and Muz heard no such sounds. It was as though nature knew what a terrible event was taking place and all the animals had gone into hiding, even more fearful of humans now than they normally were.
Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel Page 10