UniteDead Kingdom. Stuart Irving Irving
growl, but missed, careering into the kitchen table and chairs. Marsha screamed again, quieter this time, as if further away. Joe looked to the side door but it was blocked by the table. The
[bastard is kidnapping her what do I do]
Indian man came forward again. Joe reached for the cutlery drawer, pulled it open, and scrambled for the biggest knife as the attacker bore down on him, baring his teeth. He drove the wide serrated blade up and into maniac’s throat. He gagged at the guttural choking noise it made as it slid into his head all the way to the handle. Joe realised he’d just killed a man and felt like vomiting, but gathered himself and ran out the front door to save his wife. From the overwrought messages there was talk of violence and people being captured so he assumed they were trying to escape with her.
But she hadn’t gone far; she’d been dragged just outside the door and onto the grassy driveway alongside the house. But there were now three attackers, not one. He collapsed to his knees when he saw what they'd done to her. They were hunched over her, biting chunks out of different parts of her quivering body, not even bothering to look up in fear of being seen. An obese elderly man had torn off her ear with his podgy hand to feed into his blood-smeared mouth; an equally large teenage girl was biting hungrily into Marsha’s right breast, tearing a fleshy tendon up in an arc until it snapped on to her grey looking face; and a twenty-something man dressed in a blood-stained Islamic white tunic was kneeling down to hungrily chew into her lower stomach.
Just as Joe shakily rose and was about to race over to her, he sensed movement behind him. He felt long sharp fingernails dig into the back of his neck as a woman’s hand grabbed him. With a yelp he spun round to shake off whoever it was, but he lost balance on the uneven paving slab and went down, with the attacker still holding on. She landed with a thud on Joe’s front, the weight winding him and the smell of death and excrement almost making him vomit again. The image of Marsha’s twitching body raced through his mind. With reserves of strength he never knew existed he shoved up through his narrow shoulders and launched the clawing woman off his sprawled body and up in the air. She came thundering back down towards him just as he rolled out from underneath. Her skull made an audible CRACK on the paving slab. The dirty blonde hair covered her face preventing him seeing if she was still conscious but a shift in her body a second later gave him the answer and he leapt back unto his feet to rush Marsha’s attackers.
He stopped dead when he saw his wife and a deep mournful sob escaped him. All three of the cannibalistic attackers had been busy at their respective feeding areas in the ten seconds that he’d been fending off the woman. The guy at her stomach was clawing his way into her innards. The teenage girl was chewing her way round the cavity where her breast had been. The fat man had devoured her ear and now chewed into her eye socket; popping her eye and slurping it down like a child with a Cadbury’s Creme Egg.
His wife was no longer shuddering, just limp and unreactive to the triple attack. Joe felt something click deep down inside him, something give. Everything turned grey and out of focus, like he had slipped out of reality. He dimly felt a tugging at his shoe and absent-mindedly pulled away from it and stepped to the side. He stared at the remains of his wife one last time, felt hot tears spill down his face, turned round and walked slowly out his garden and into the havoc-strewn street.
Similar attacks were happening all around him, like an ultra-violent distortion of a beautiful suburban spring morning. He continued his slow steady stride to the bottom of the street, turning right towards the main road. A neighbour who came out onto his porch in his dressing gown, massively hung-over and with no idea of the city-wide meltdown, stared at Joe as he strode past the end of his garden.
“Hi—” the neighbour started, but thought better of it. Joe didn’t even flinch from his stride. He had seen Joe in the neighbourhood before and he seemed friendly. But he now thought Joe was by far the most haunted-looking human he had ever seen. That accolade would remain intact forever; he himself would be violently killed within the hour.
Chapter 9: Zones 1-6 Passed
Four weeks after the fateful call from Jack, Zan sat on a discoloured single mattress with his head in his hands, dismayed but at the same time relieved by the day’s events. His life had been on a constant knife-edge since the outbreak. The simplest misstep had often been the difference between survival and the worst death imaginable. He pushed down on his thighs and hoisted himself up to witness the latest outcome for himself. He looked down from the second floor window of the abandoned house with calm indifference as six undead tore apart the twitching body of his … What? What should I call these fellow London-escapees that continued to latch on to him? Travel-companions? Mobile-zombie-fodder? Snacks in slacks? I guess that will do. He almost smiled but was too worn out to even muster a grin.
His latest ex-companion had shown promise at one stage. That ‘one stage’ being the first ten minutes of meeting her somewhere in the war-zone that that was now South-East London. So no change there then. This time he quietly chuckled to himself. Am I going insane? This made him laugh even more.
She was (definitely past-tense now) about eighteen or nineteen but she acted more like twelve; wide-eyed and terrified at every sound and every movement. Zan, conversely, had gradually become inured at the surrounding misery and grinding discomfort of survival and slow escape from London. He had learned to respond to events with alertness rather than emotion. She preferred the other way round. She said her name was Molly, but he didn’t want to know and didn’t use it once. With every yelp out loud at leaves moving in the breeze he knew he was closer and closer to ditching her. He needn’t have fretted over that decision: people like that didn’t last long these days.
Half an hour previously they were inching through the carnage in a street somewhere in Maidstone, Kent, according to a UK map he found in a ransacked news agent (his bright idea of printing maps floundered when he had to dive into a canal to escape attack in the first week and they were ruined). They were en route to the channel, as per Jack’s instructions. He had convinced the girl - and others before her - that Switzerland offered the only chance of permanent safety. Then suddenly a mangy looking Alsatian ran out from a garden path and Molly had yelped (always with the fucking yelping!) loudly in surprise. It didn’t take long for them to appear in response to the yelp. Their motor skills were limited, especially the less recently dead, but their hearing was fine. And so come they did, not two minutes later. Shambling rotting corpses, driven by gnawing hunger, converging towards the noise. That had been her first mistake.
Then, panic took over. She darted towards the nearest door, tripped over a pavement slab, and went sprawling head first into a fence, crashing through it into the garden. She lay still. Zan had watched all this with calm bemusement, shaking his head. It was decision-making time. He had no bandages, no first-aid kit and nothing to wake her up. She was out cold and was a deceptively big girl, probably seventy kilos plus. The undead were closing in, ten or a dozen of them now. He jogged to the side to draw them away from her then spun round on the spot to see four quicker ones closing in on him. A gruesome-looking pack of about eight still closed in on her. Then he heard her groans as she woke up, turning quickly to screams as she saw them looming towards her a few metres away. Zan hesitated. I’m never going to be able to
[you barely even tried what kind of man]
save her. He had fourteen crossbow bolts left but they were closing too fast and the midday sun provided no hiding place. With an instant pang of regret he spun on his heels and calmly jogged in the opposite direction and into the first house he saw with a sturdy door. Her growing screams alerted the zombies who’d been near to him to change direction towards her. A few seconds later the full complement of twelve were on her. Her last action on Earth was a look of complete revulsion towards him jogging away, and her last thought was of utter abandonment. Her recently cut head (the lamppost she ran into when she heard a door slam shut in the wind) only allowed her to see out of one eye. That vision was quickly obscured by the withered outstretched hands reaching in to slowly tear her apart. She never stopped trying to look in Zan’s direction throughout her violent, noisy demise.
Zan walked carefully through the house, shutting, locking and barricading doors behind him and darted up to a 2nd floor bedroom facing the main street. Ducking under the