“How far south does this length of the cordon follow the road,” Muz asked Jay, unrealistically expecting the youth to know the answer.
“It’s da same all da way down dat way as far as I been,” Jay told him. “And I come up here from West Hendon, bruv.”
Muz’s face seemed to pale a little as he looked at Chuck.
“We’ve been heading north,” he said in barely more than a whisper. “And all the time, the western edge of the cordon has been little more than half a mile away.”
Chuck didn’t have anything to say in response and instead chose to examine the road blocks below.
“I said we should have kept going west,” the copper continued, still looking at Chuck. “Back at Colindale nick, I said we should have kept going west.”
Chuck still didn’t respond.
“Yeah, but it don’t matter though, fam’,” Jay told him. “The army ain’t lettin’ anybody through. Look at dem dead people, man. Dey weren’t all zombies, you get me?”
“What are you saying?” Muz asked.
“I seen one person, right. No way was dey infected. Dey was still proper normal but dey was trying to climb one of those road blocks. I was gonna do the same. This army guy on a roof was, like, shouting at him to stop but he kept trying to climb up. Next ting, bang. The army guy fired his gun and the man dropped like a sack of shit. Swear down.”
“The military is firing on survivors?” Muz asked incredulously.
“No lie, bruv.”
“I don’t care,” the copper stated after a moment’s thought. “We’ve got to try to get through.”
“What? Are you crazy?” Chuck said, breaking his silence. “You heard what the boy just said.”
“I ain’t no boy, bruv.”
“I don’t care,” Muz said again. “According to his story, they tried to reason with the man. That means they’ll give us chance to talk before they consider shooting.”
“Nah, man. You don’t wanna go anywhere near dat road,” Jay warned. “It’s suicide. For real.”
“I don’t care,” Muz stated yet again but his voice was weary now. “I’ve got to get out of this God forsaken hell hole.”
“Please don’t blaspheme,” Margaret said from the doorway to the flat, having followed them to see what they were up to.
Muz looked forlornly at her.
“Come back to the other flat,” the woman said. “I think young Jay here should tell the others just what he saw and we should then discuss our situation as a group.”
Illogically reluctant to let the perimeter of the quarantine zone out of his sight, Muz turned away from the woman and looked back out over the balcony. He thought it strange that the boarder also marked the edge of his borough. As intimately as he knew the streets this side of the A5, he couldn’t name a single road on the other, never having patrolled them.
Over the backs of the terrace houses directly to his front, there lay a small wooded area with a modest lake just beyond. To the rear of that body of open water, there stretched the lawns of a park. The common land had been hastily protected with more razor wire and several watch towers. Its acres of grass were obscured by green tents, various helicopters and military and construction vehicles.
“Shit, get back inside,” Chuck said, ducking below the level of the balcony’s handrail.
“What’s wrong?” Muz asked, looking down at him with a perplexed expression.
“We’ve been pinged,” Chuck answered, still hunched over and making his way through the door.
“What?”
“They’ve got a bead on you.”
“Who’s got a what?” Muz asked, becoming more and more confused with each question.
“Woah, look at your chest,” Jay said to the copper, before he too ran back into the flat.
Muz looked down to see the brilliant red dot of a laser sight dancing around his torso. Looking back at the houses below, he saw, using the incline of a roof for cover, a marksman with his rifle trained on him. Slowly, he backed up into the flat.
“Told you, cuz,” Jay said. “Dey mean business, innit.”
“Jay?” Muz said.
“Yo.”
“Shut up.” It wasn’t the boy’s fault, Muz told himself, but that stupid accent was beginning to get on his nerves.
Re-entering their flat, Muz went and sat silent on the sofa, moody and deep in thought. Not long after, Carl came out of the bathroom.
“Oh, oh, oh. I wanna feel free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man! I feel like a...,” he sang as he opened the door but stopped on seeing Chuck stood just the other side.
“Like a what?” Chuck asked dryly.
Carl ignored him, walking past into one of the bedrooms.
“That’s a beautiful voice you’ve got,” Chuck called after him.
He heard the other man mutter something in return but couldn’t make out what it was.
“Is Jay short for James or Jason, young man?” Margaret asked the youth in the living room.
“It’s not my real name,” Jay replied, wiping his baseball bat clean on a T-shirt he had found lying over the back of a chair. “It’s my street name, innit.”
“So, what is your real name?”
Jay looked around suspiciously at everyone in the room, trying to determine whether he could trust them.
“It’s Tim, but yous all better not call me dat,” he warned. “Only my mum calls me dat..., called me dat.”
“So why the nickname?” Amy now asked, doing her best not to smirk.
“’Cos Tim’s stupid, innit,” Jay told her. “You can’t sound boss wiv a name like dat.”
“But why Jay?” Margaret asked.
“Jay, like as in blunt, innit,” Jay told her, as though it should have been obvious.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” the elderly lady responded.
“Zoot? Reefer? Spliff? Joint?” Jay said, rapidly running out of similes.
“Oh, he means cannabis cigarettes,” Amy told the older woman, putting it into words she should understand.
“Yeah,” Jay confirmed.
“You named yourself after a colloquialism for cannabis cigarettes?” Margaret asked with dismay.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure we can’t call you Tim?”
“Name’s Jay,” Jay told her stonily.
“The boy’s an idiot,” Chuck said, towelling down his fat hairy chest in the hallway, having had by far the quickest shower so far.
“Hey man, what’s your problem?” Jay challenged him.
“And he’s got an attitude problem,” Chuck continued.
Jay kissed his teeth at the big black man, pursing his lips and sucking air in between them. Chuck knew it for the insult it was.
“Nothing a little discipline wouldn’t sort out though,” he said.
After a while, Carl came back into the living room, having spent a long time blow drying his thick grey hair with the dryer Amy had purloined from another flat. He had put a lot of effort into combing and styling it into the correct parting. When he had finished, it looked a damn site better than the greasy filthy mess it had been.
“Is beautiful,” Tom declared with beaming grin.
Carl ignored him.
“Yeah, I’ve got a semi,” Chuck joined in, pulling on his clean trousers.
“Shut up,” Carl now bit.
“What is semi?” Tom asked.
When Chuck demonstrated by partially extending a finger in front of his groin, the Pole bellowed with laughter.
“I not have semi but is very pretty.”
“Yeah, well, at least I don’t look stupid in those trousers,” Carl tried to fight back, pointing at Chuck.
It was a poor attempt at a retort but he was right. Chuck did look ridiculous. Although the trousers were wide enough at the waist to accommodate his considerable girth, the man who had bought them had obviously been a good foot shorter than him. But still, half-mast legs were preferable to wearing those filthy police jogging
bottoms.
“I’m sorry,” Margaret told the big African. “But I was unable to find anything in the other flats that I thought might fit you better.”
“That’s okay,” Chuck replied brusquely, feeling uncomfortable with his obesity being remarked upon.
It was Tom’s turn then to get cleaned up, and when he had finished in the bathroom, that only left Jay. Even Digby had had a wash of sorts, Amy having rubbed him down with a couple of damp towels. The dog now lay at her feet, meticulously licking himself.
“You should really have a shower too,” Margaret told the young lad.
“I’m good,” he replied. “I showered yesterday.”
“You’ve spots of blood all over your clothes,” Margaret pressed.
“Yes, and it could well be contaminated,” Amy backed her up.
“I’m good, innit,” Jay said again.
“Get in there and clean yourself up, young man, or Amy and I will do it by force,” Margaret told him sternly when he still didn’t make a move.
Fearing being stripped and seen naked by the two women, he didn’t dare call their bluff. He got out of his armchair and hurried off to the bathroom, grumbling under his breath.
“And take the fresh underwear and socks I’ve placed on the bed for you,” Margaret called after him, grinning with shared victory at Amy. “Don’t put those dirty one’s back on.”
When the youth returned, clean, dry, and in fresh clothing, Margaret got him to retell his story of the soldiers on the cordon and the man they had killed.
“Oh, my...,” Amy gasped upon its culmination, covering her mouth with a hand. “So, what do we do now?”
“We stay here,” Chuck jumped in. “We stay here and we ride this out.”
“We should at least go talk to the soldiers,” Muz protested.
“And risk getting shot?” Carl asked. “I want to get out of here as much as anyone but…”
“They’re not going to shoot us unless we actually try to break through the perimeter,” Muz explained.
“I think it’s too risky,” Amy said.
“It’s worth a try,” Muz said. He was almost pleading now.
The others just stared back at him.
“Oh, come on,” he went on. “What’s the alternative? Stay here and wait for those cannibals to find us?”
“No,” Chuck told him. “We stay here and wait for the quarantine to be lifted and for the military to escort us to a safe medical facility.”
“Really?” Muz spat back sarcastically. “And how long is that going to take? Days? Weeks? Months?”
“It’s not just getting our heads blown off that we’ve got to worry about,” Chuck continued to argue. “We can’t risk wandering the streets. We were almost overwhelmed by that last attack. If Carl hadn’t found that MP-5, we would have been screwed. And what about those cows? Remember them?”
It was decided. Fear prevailed among the group and they elected to remain in the block, pending new developments. Though Muz disagreed with the decision, he agreed to abide by it; there was no way he was going to risk the streets on his own.
Annoyed and angry, he got up and stomped off into the small kitchen. Taking the bag of pasta twists from the cupboard, he threw them into the biggest saucepan he could find and filled it with water. As he placed the pan on the hob, he noticed a tiny black ant walking across the work surface and absently wondered as to how it had come to find itself on the thirteenth floor. The whole tower had to be infested with them, he decided.
Hearing the police officer beginning to prepare some form of meal, Margaret came in to the kitchen to help. With only the two of them in such a small area, the room felt crowded.
“Do you want pasta twists with jam, peanut butter or… oh, Bolognese sauce?” Muz asked, making an effort to sound more light-hearted than he actually felt.
“Given the meagre options available...,” Margaret replied, picking up the jar of tomato and herb sauce and reading the label with an expression of distaste.
“I’ve got a can of corned beef in my rucksack,” Muz told her. “We could stir that in as well.”
“Sounds delightful,” Margaret said before changing the topic from the prospect of such terrible cuisine. “Given our current predicament, it would seem silly to continue calling you officer Dogan. Do you have a first name?”
“Mustafa, but everyone just calls me Muz.”
“Okay, Mustafa.”
Muz sighed heavily, feeling homesick and missing his wife’s embrace. If Margaret insisted on using his full first name, it would constantly remind him of Farah who did the same.
“Try to cheer up, Mustafa,” Margaret told him, placing a hand on his. “We will get through this but you need to be strong. I need you to be strong. As does Amy and the boy.” As she said this, her eyes contained an element of the broken woman she had so recently almost become.
Muz really didn’t need the added pressure of that statement right at that moment but he smiled and gave Margaret a hug.
Having wolfed down Muz and Margret’s corned beef pasta slop, the group spent the remainder of the day raiding other flats in the tower. As reluctant as he was to do so, Muz climbed back into his smelly stab vest before he ventured through the iron gate. It had proven to be a life saver.
Daring to go down several floors, they hit a number of flats. Each time they kicked in a door, they fully expected to be set upon by a berserking psychopath. It never happened thankfully, and they burgled the modest homes without hindrance, taking whatever food they could carry and anything else they thought might be useful.
As the light from outside began to grow dim, they made their way back up the stairs one more time, carrying their last bounty of the day. The kitchen and one corner of the living room in their flat was now brimming with a hoard of canned goods and a few fresh foods that hadn’t gone off yet. Chuck grumbled moodily at the poor quantity and the quality of the cigarettes he had found.
“Bloody Silk Cut? They’re kids’ fags,” he griped.
Tom unloaded a sports bag he had found, lining up the contents on the kitchen work surface. He had almost filled it with bottles of spirits.
“Please take it steady with all that stuff,” Muz begged the man.
Tom laughed in return. “Is not all for the drinking,” he said.
The stocky Pole then tore several strips from a pillowcase he had acquired, stuffed one in the neck of each open bottle and secured them in place with masking tape.
“See?” Tom said proudly. “Boom.”
Muz smiled back. He wasn’t sure whether he should be relieved that the man wasn’t planning on consuming the entire stash or worried that he was making such dangerous weapons.
Their second and last meal of the day was a much more appetising one than the first had been, consisting of chicken breasts, chopped yellow and red peppers and sundried tomatoes in a creamy garlic sauce on a bed of basmati rice, courtesy of Chuck and Amy’s combined efforts.
“I’d prefer a Mackie D’s,” Jay remarked ungratefully.
They then spent the evening talking about what they had each been through to find themselves here, some more openly than others, and watching the news channel. Unfortunately, despite the London Pandemic story taking up almost all the air time, they learned very little. It seemed that the authorities attempting to take charge of this mess had very few answers, or at least none they were yet willing to share with the public.
When asked what had happened down in Cricklewood to make him walk all the way up here, Tom told the others about his experience of the initial outbreak.
“I try to keep family in flat, like TV say,” he said. “I put furniture against door, to make strong but they hear Adam, my son, making tears. Was not his fault. He only six years.
“They come to door, many, many people, and try to get inside. We have no choice. We must to go. Climb out of window and we run but wife hurt foot. She fall on… outside ladder? I do not know English name.”
“Fire es
cape?” Muz helped him out.
“Tak, yes, fire escape,” Tom nodded. “She not run good. In the roads, many people scared. People fighting. People eating … people. My boy so scared now, I have to carry him.
“We see soldiers making wall between buildings and we run to them for help. Other people do the same and soldiers stop them with… big water pipes?”
“Crowd control water cannons,” Chuck stated.
Tom nodded. “And smoke that makes men cry. But still people try to get past them…” Tom paused at this point, swallowing down a lump in his throat, his eyes becoming moist. “Soldiers use guns now. Not just on crazy people… on everyone. We try to turn and run but too many people too close. We cannot run. I shout them not to shoot but they not stop…
“Alina, my wife, she fall then. I try to help but I see… she… she not move.” A watery trail began to emerge from one of Tom’s nostril’s now, as he fought back the tears. “Blood splash in my eyes now and I feel my boy go loose… he die in my arms.
“I hold them for long time and I want to die also now, but God does not allow. After this, I start to walk. I not know where I go. I not think. I want to kill soldiers, but I just walk. Then I find you.”
With tears coursing down her cheeks, Margaret leaned forward in her armchair and passed Tom the bottle of whiskey she had been keeping from him. No wonder the poor man had been so drunk, she thought.
Tom nodded in gratitude and took a big gulp of the contents. He then held out the bottle, offering it to those around him. Muz reached out for it in solemn silence and took an almost equally long swig. He hated whiskey, but needed something to dull his nerves and numb his mind.
Amy was next to eagerly take the bottle. The only two not to partake were Jay and Digby. The youth could have murdered a joint at that moment, whereas the dog was simply happy chewing away at his rawhide bone.
“We can’t afford to get drunk,” Muz warned, after the bottle had done a couple of circuits of the room. “We need to keep our wits about us, in case anything happens.”
“He’s right,” Chuck agreed, though he could have quite easily polished off the contents of the bottle all by himself.
Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel Page 31