Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel

by James Carlson

  So many top brass had been dropped in and lifted back out of the camp over the past few days that the Sergeant had given up trying to remember who everyone was.

  The Colonel was a physically diminutive man, standing a good head shorter than the Sergeant at his side, but he more than compensated for his lack of height with his stern manner. Out of earshot, his troops referred to him as ‘The Chihuahua’ or ‘Napoleon’, because like so many small men, he had a ridiculously overbearing manner and a louder than necessary bark.

  “Sorry, Sir,” the Sergeant said. “We’ve been infiltrated.”

  “What? How?” Grieves snapped back.

  “I’m just looking into that.”

  The Colonel looked at each of the trespassers in turn, attempting to give them his most steely stare. They were standing instinctively huddled tightly together for mutual protection.

  “Line them up,” Grieves shouted. “Let’s see exactly what we’ve got, shall we?”

  The Sergeant barked at the survivors, relaying the little officer’s orders. Amy jumped in response and Digby barked back. The nervous civilians did as they were told, forming a line in front of the soldiers. Raj kept his head hung low, hiding his eyes, knowing that their light concentrating membranes would betray him. Sam, however, who had been concealing himself at the back of the huddle, could not so readily hide his strangeness.

  “Jesus. Look at that,” a soldier cried out in disgust on seeing him.

  All the soldiers stepped back fearfully and trained their weapons on the deformed man. He cringed in response and lifted his arms defensively, which only served to show off his weird child’s limb.

  Just then, there came a scream from almost directly above. Everyone looked up to see the soldier who had been sent up the scaffolding come tumbling over the edge of the wooden boards, interlocked in a wrestle with another man.

  They hit the rubber matting and wet mud with a hard slap, bouncing back into the air a couple of feet before coming to rest. One of the two men lay unmoving, probably killed outright by the fall. The other however, appeared completely unfazed and began feeding on the first, tearing hungrily into his neck.

  “Fergusson’s infected,” someone shouted.

  “Shit, not another one,” the Sergeant said wearily, shaking his head. He’d lost too many men to those rats with wings. “Do them both,” he ordered sadly.

  The various soldiers opened fire on the two men sprawled in the dirt, riddling them both full of bullets. Amy wanted to cover her ears, but had to hold onto Digby’s collar with both hands, as he went berserk. Only when both heads had been completely reduced to mush, did the volley stop. The soldiers’ attentions then quickly turned back to the survivors, Sam in particular.

  “Step clear of the zombie, you idiots,” Colonel Grieves ordered the group. He was scared and could feel himself beginning to flap.

  “He’s not a zombie,” Amy dared to say.

  “He’s recovered,” Muz added, his thoughts beginning to swim again.

  “Really?” Grieves said sarcastically.

  The officer drew his handgun from his leg holster, levelled it at Sam and shot him in the chest. The deformed survivor staggered back a couple of steps, then just stood there, looking down at the hole in his body.

  “Please,” Amy begged. “He’s no threat to you.”

  Sam was too shocked to feel any pain as yet. With child-like curiosity, he lifted his T-shirt to reveal the wound. A trickle of blood spilled from the hole, but stopped running after only a few inches. It congealed almost instantaneously, and then defying both gravity and medical science, crawled back up his chest into the hole.

  Grieves was nothing less than panicked by that. With his hand shaking badly, he shot at Sam again. This time the bullet hit the man in the head, removing half his cranium with a splintering crack. Sam dropped to the ground, face first in a puddle, motionless save for a twitching foot.

  Amy screamed.

  “Shut up,” Grieves yelled at her. He appeared to be on the verge of hyperventilating.

  The Sergeant called out to a number of men dressed in biohazard suits by a nearby tent that was different from the others, in that it was covered over with clear plastic and appeared to have an inflatable airlock entrance.

  “Take this thing and those two men away and burn them with all the others,” he said, when they came over.

  Raj felt disgusted by the military officer’s response to his own fear. It angered him that the man’s overriding self-preservation had led him to kill Sam without even wanting to understand the situation. He kept his eyes low, as the soldiers in bio-suits carried the bodies away, watching in disdain.

  “The rest of you strip,” the Colonel said flatly, eying the group’s mud and blood stained clothing.

  “We’re not infected,” Amy whimpered. “Please. We’re just trying to escape. We’ll die inside the quarantine.”

  “Escape?” Grieves laughed back almost hysterically. “There is no escape. The quarantine didn’t hold.”

  Without realising it, Raj lifted his head a fraction, to look at the little man with sudden interest. His alert adapted eyes glinted under his brow.

  “But how?” Muz asked, straining his mind to follow what was going on. “No zombies, human or otherwise, could get over the barriers.”

  “Wrong,” Grieves told him. “We thought we had the spread contained for so long, knowing that it was limited only to mammals. Our ground defences were impassable. The barriers stopped the human casualties and anything bigger. We also laid down rat poison by the barrel load at vulnerable points and in the sewer systems to kill anything smaller.”

  “So what happened?” Amy needed to know.

  This was good, Raj thought. The military man was starting to engage the group on a more human level, seeing them as people. Hopefully, it might lead to a degree of empathy.

  “It was the bats,” the Colonel said. “No one even gave a thought to those bastards until it was too late. Now the infection is spreading out of control. Nothing can stop it. It has even spread beyond our shores. Yesterday, a plane crashed in Washington DC. There were no survivors, but people still walked away from the wreckage.”

  The short officer’s voice grew higher in pitch, as he continued to talk and he sounded like he might actually be about to cry. The heavy set Sergeant at his side frowned and looked sideways at him. Grieves caught his glance and embarrassed, pulled himself together.

  “Now strip, all of you,” he demanded.

  Without any further protest, the group did as they were told. They could see the Colonel was not someone they wanted to argue with right now. Shaking and crying, Amy peeled off her clothes down to her bra and knickers.

  “Everything,” Grieves shouted at her unnecessarily. “We need to see every inch of you.”

  Snot and tears running down her face, Amy removed her underwear, crossing her legs and covering her breasts with her arms. She could feel the eyes of every soldier there scrutinising her. Some wore expressions of unconcealed lust. She knew that her short podgy body was not the most attractive by any means, and guessed that the men couldn’t have had any shore leave in some time. One soldier sniggered and the Sergeant shot him a warning glare.

  “She’s injured,” Grieves told the Sergeant.

  “Sir, that is a bullet wound,” the hefty man told him.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the wound might still have got infected,” the officer speculated nervously. “We can’t afford to take any chances.”

  The Sergeant gave him a long look.

  “Turn around,” Grieves snapped at the group.

  “Why?” Tom said in return, with a firm stare that caused the Colonel to avoid his eyes. “You shoot me, you do face to my face.”

  “Do it,” the officer shouted.

  “We’re not going to shoot you, unless you give us reason to,” the Sergeant said, in an effort to calm the Pole. “Just turn around. We need to check you for in
juries.”

  Reluctantly, Tom turned his back. The group stared at the rain coursing down the corrugated iron wall just in front of them, half-expecting a bullet in the head at any moment. They trembled against the cold downpour and with fear.

  “Okay, turn back around,” the Sergeant told them, after what seemed like an eternity.

  “You, lift up your arm,” Grieves told Muz.

  The police officer had been keeping one arm pressed tight to his side, trying to hide his wound without making it obvious, but the Colonel had picked up on his odd stance. Muz froze, fear evident in his eyes.

  “Do as I fucking say,” the officer commanded, turning his gun on him.

  Slowly, Muz lifted his arm to reveal the festering bite wound to the side of his abdomen. Seeing it for the first time, Amy and Tom looked shocked and stepped away. Muz glared at them, and then back at the Colonel.

  “What’s that? How did you get that injury?” Grieves demanded, his voice growing in pitch again.

  “I fell. Two storeys. Landed on a shard of glass,” Muz said coldly. He knew the story wouldn’t wash and could feel a rage growing within him.

  “Looks like a bite to me,” the Colonel replied.

  The copper could see the veins beginning to bulge up the sides of the short military man’s neck, as his blood pressure began to soar. The sight and the thought of the blood surging through those tubes gave Muz a sensation he didn’t understand. It was desire.

  “I… fell,” Muz repeated, his upper lip curling in anger, revealing his teeth. He fought a welling urge now to bite the little man’s throat out.

  “What do you think?” Grieves asked the Sergeant indecisively.

  “Yeah. It’s a bite,” the soldier said sadly.

  “Fuck you,” Muz yelled with burning rage and ran at the Colonel, mouth agape.

  He grabbed the officer by the shoulders and pulled him in, towards his drooling snarling teeth. As a terrible hunger took him, all Muz could think of at that moment, was the consuming desire to taste the man’s thick rich blood and swallow down great lumps of his still pulsing flesh.

  Placing the muzzle of his rifle against the side of the copper’s head, the Sergeant pulled the trigger and blew his brains out. Blood and brain matter splashed over the Colonel before Muz slumped to the ground.

  “Bastard,” Amy yelled.

  She ran forward, screaming, and scratched the Sergeant hard down both cheeks with the nails of her hands. The heavy set soldier slapped her across the face so hard that she fell to the floor.

  Raj still stood back, not moving, head low, refusing to be drawn into this animal insanity, despite his growing anger. He found it hard to believe that only a few days ago, he too had been just as self-centred and cruel as these beasts. They disgusted him now. History showed that throughout the ages, those who held power had always abused those whom they dominated. Nothing had changed in centuries, as these men here only proved yet again, arbitrarily killing anyone who might pose a threat to them.

  Tom suddenly lost all control then, lunged forward with a speed that seemed beyond his stocky stature, and punched the Sergeant in the face over and over. The soldier staggered back and took three shockingly hard blows before he managed to fight back. The two men then exchanged a flurry of solid punches.

  Grieves extended his Browning nine millimetre pistol towards the Pole.

  “Stop,” he shouted furiously.

  Holding the Sergeant around the throat, squeezing tight with his vice-like grip, Tom turned to the Colonel and spat in his face. The officer shot him dead where he stood. Steaming blood spraying several feet into the chilly air from the cavity in his head, Tom hit the ground.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Amy began to gibber.

  Still lying in the dirt, she began to urinate down her naked thigh. Digby barked wildly, baring his teeth. It was only Amy pulling herself together enough to straddle him and grab him by the collar, leaning back with all her bodyweight that stopped the dog from leaping forward and attacking.

  “Shut that mutt up or I will,” the Sergeant told her flatly.

  “Leave him alone,” Amy said meekly, blubbering through drizzling snot. “Please, I’ve got him. I’ve got him.”

  “We can’t afford to take any chances,” Colonel Grieves said, looking down at the dead police officer and Polish man, as though he were actually apologising to them.

  Though clearly dead, Tom seemed to be taunting him. His eyes were blank and defocused, but a macabre satisfied smile was etched over his mouth. Grieves felt the need to tear his eyes away but couldn’t, already feeling haunted by what he had done.

  “You get any of that shit in your mouth?” the Sergeant asked the Colonel in a cold tone, looking intently at the tiny pieces of Muz and splashes of blood that covered the man’s head.

  “No,” Grieves told him, staring back just as firmly. “You?”

  “No.”

  “Please,” Amy whispered almost inaudibly. “We just want to live.”

  Raj began to cry, unable to hold his feelings at bay any longer. It was not that he was afraid. They were tears of despair. Humanity proclaimed itself to be the pinnacle of millions of years of evolution. They believed themselves to be far superior to all other species, and that by merit of their intellect and technology, they were something above and beyond other creatures. And yet, it was in times of desperation, such as this that they proved themselves to be nothing more than animals, ruled by fear and selfishness.

  He knew that he too had been guilty of such egocentric behaviour, prior to his change, and he despised himself for it. All that had happened in the space of little more than one week was testament to his own selfish animal goals. He had known from an early age that he could never excel physically, but in modern society, a man didn’t need physical superiority to prove himself as a more viable mate.

  Realising as a child that he was intellectually gifted, he had spent his whole life working to show off his superiority, pushing the advancements of medical science, so that he might stand above other men and be remembered as someone better than most. Primitive.

  The vast majority of humans were concerned only with satisfying their own urges and desires. All else was pretence. They cared only about finding mates with whom to procreate, making money to provide themselves with food, a home, and whatever luxuries pleased them. Their behaviour was that of all animals, right down the evolutionary ladder to the most basic microbes.

  He looked at the horrific scene around him, at the pointless death, at the fear and cowardice in the soldiers’ eyes. The dog barked furiously at the military men around him, as did the diminutive officer. Raj felt able to observe those around him now with the same detachment as he had once viewed bacteria through a microscope.

  “You all have the same life goals as germs,” he said aloud, no longer able to repress the urge to verbalise his utter disdain.

  “What did you say?” Grieves barked.

  Raj didn’t repeat the insult.

  The Colonel stared at him, red in the face and breathing heavily.

  “What do you want me to do with these two and the dog?” the Sergeant asked, wiping his own blood from his nose and chin.

  The Colonel continued to stare suspiciously at Raj. The Indian man had remained silent until just then, and he hadn’t paid him much regard. But now, he saw there was something odd about the man, something in his stance maybe, the way he almost looked uncomfortable standing there on two feet. Though he tried, the officer couldn’t put his finger on it. And why was he looking at the floor, as though attempting to hide his face?

  “Sir?” the Sergeant pressed him.

  Grieves sighed, his scrutiny broken. The whole country was in ruins, he thought, potentially the whole world. What was left of the military presence here at the epicentre of it all was a joke. Their efforts had been for nothing. They had failed to maintain the quarantine. What did it matter now then if he allowed this man and woman and their dog to live?

/>   “They don’t appear to have been bitten,” the Colonel concluded, his voice and temperament beginning to calm. “Get them on the next flight out north. Have them delivered to the testing areas.”

  Without waiting to be told she could, Amy was already clambering back into her clothes, her eyes red raw from her salty tears. Raj did the same.

  “Come with me,” the Sergeant told them when they were ready and ushered them with armed escort towards the huge gates at the north side of the compound.

  He had heard rumours that in some of the testing areas, ‘testing’ meant vivisection, studies that could only be described as autopsies on the still living.

  “A comprehensive debrief of these people may provide some new insight,” Colonel Grieves said, as he walked beside the Sergeant, his short legs struggling to match the larger man’s easy pace. “Then they can be handed over to the doctors.”

  Amy mistakenly chose to believe that the officer meant her injuries would be treated and she would be cared for. Her hope that she might still survive this began to lift. But what about poor Raj, she thought. As soon as someone caught sight of those eyes of his, he was as good as dead.

  “Sir,” a soldier shouted to the Colonel, as he came running over, his feet splashing through the puddles.

  “Sir, we’ve been given a full extraction order,” the communications specialist said. “We’re to recall all Operation Spring Clean units immediately and prepare for immediate evacuation.”

  “At last,” Grieves said with open relief.

  The Sergeant shared his sentiment. He had known for a while that their mission here was beyond salvaging, and had been waiting with frustration for those up the chain of command to realise the same.

  “We’ve orders to re-converge in Plymouth, where 42 Commando are still fighting to maintain an infection free population centre,” the comm’s man went on.

  “Good,” Grieves said. “Get all vital shit packed and on the helicopters as fast as possible. The quicker we Foxtrot Oscar out of this hell hole the better.”

  The Sergeant nodded.

  At that moment, there came a series of cries of terror from behind. Amy, Raj and the soldiers all turned to see, oozing over the top of the south wall was the enormous amoeboid mass, now all the more bulbous and disgusting for the eight blistering and melting cows still struggling and kicking within it.