Читать книгу UniteDead Kingdom - Stuart Irving Irving - Страница 8

Just as Zan began his long, fraught, emotional call with Jack a postgraduate medical student named Tanja had wrapped her bitten fingers in medical gauze and near the end of her rushed taxi journey from the outskirts of Kamnik to Ljubljana Airport.

The airport was only fifteen klicks away and, as usual, she’d been late in booking a cab. By the time it arrived - also late - she was nursing the fresh wound. She collapsed heavily onto the back seat of the car and hurriedly slammed the door. The taxi-driver looked round in concern.

“What hap—”

THUMP!

A large man in overalls banged awkwardly against the back window where Tanja had just got in. She looked panic-stricken and the blood was trickling down the arm which cradled her bitten hand.

“What’s going on? Did he do that?” said the now-panicked taxi-driver.

“Yes! Right outside my front door, crazy bastard came from nowhere! I didn’t want to miss my cab or the flight so I ran round the block. Lazy bastard didn’t even run, just creepily walked after me. Anyway, I’m already late; take me straight to the airport.” She appeared calm, maybe in shock.

“Surely the hospital first my dear, no?”

“No, I will miss my graduation in London tomorrow, I’m a medic, I’ll fix this. Just hurry please!”

“OK, OK.” He shook his head, thinking about blood stains on his carpet. They accelerated away, spinning gravel on to the face of the still pursuing man in overalls.

“What time is your flight?”

She looked at her watch. “In just under thirty minutes. The security gate closes in ten.”

The taxi-driver smiled. “You’ll be there in seven”

Despite the intense pain from her two bitten fingers she smiled at him in the rear view mirror and started to dress the wound to avoid delay at the airport.

She eventually made it through security in a rush of smiles and pleases and thanks, and sighed in relief as she boarded the plane to London; the last person to take her seat. As she sat down she overheard whispers about the town square riots. Passengers around her were watching live footage on their glasses or clothes. From their whispers she surmised that the army was being called in and flights cancelled in and out the region.

“NO!” she groaned to herself, “Not this one please! I can’t miss my graduation.”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to commence our one hour five minute flight to London Heathrow airport. Weather’s clear all the way to London so we should be landing as planned at 10.45pm local time. By all accounts, due to events in Kamnik, we’re the last flight to leave Slovenia tonight, so let's get you safely to the UK. Enjoy the flight.”

Tanja sighed in relief. I couldn’t have had a more stressful start to my graduation trip. Thank God the worst is over. She cradled her bandaged right hand. The pain was intensifying.

The plane landed at Heathrow Terminal Six airport with a bump that shook Tanja awake. Her head felt woozy from the four painkillers she’d taken for the growing ache up her whole arm. After a mercifully small passport queue and seamless transition to Crossrail she hurtled towards Farringdon in Central London to stay with her sister. At 11.07pm precisely she left the Underground train and staggered over to the first set of escalators. People got out her way thinking she was drunk but her vision was completely blurred and she barely saw them. By the time she reached the top of the first escalator her whole right side felt stiff and heavy.

After the escalator she staggered even more slowly along the station tunnels. A couple looked pityingly at her and said something as they walked past but it sounded muffled and far away. Tanja finally made it to the bottom of the second escalator and immediately vomited, causing howls of complaint from the group of teenagers above her. Midway up she was losing vision and struggling to breathe. As she reached the top she felt like crying with relief when her sister’s distinctive bright red hair came into view at the station exit. She stumbled forward against the exit barriers. A station attendant saw she was covered in sick and swiped her through. Her sister caught her as she collapsed just outside the exit. The pain, numbness and infection finally reached her heart and brain-stem simultaneously.

“Rebeka I …” were Tanja’s last words. Her sister screamed for help while cradling her. My poor baby sister, what’s happened! A passer-by spoke briefly out loud to call an ambulance. Rebeka hugged her tight as she died and, overcome with panic and grief, wouldn't let go. Four minutes later Tanja suddenly opened her eyes, growled and ripped a chunk out of her sister’s neck. Rebeka fell back holding the wound, blood gushing, eyes filled with confusion. Bystanders saw the blood and ran in every direction, simultaneously shouting out loud to call the police. But a concerned elderly onlooker stopped to offer help. Before he knew what was happening, Tanja grabbed and pulled his ankle and he fell back onto the cobbles, knocking himself out cold.

He came-to moments later. The young woman he thought was ill was now snapping ferociously at his face and exposed forearm. That’s the last time I try to help a stranger in this bloody city! was his last coherent thought before he was overpowered and she chewed into his ruddy face and neck. His screams quickly became just a gurgle and then silence.

When the ambulance man and woman turned up three minutes later they thought the old man was being given mouth to mouth by a young blonde woman. They looked at each other confused - dispatch said there it was a young blonde woman who was sick and had collapsed. A red-haired woman lay completely still nearby, covered in blood. She looked dead so they hurried over to the man receiving mouth to mouth. They got closer and then both stopped dead in their tracks. He was, in fact, being eaten alive. Both leaned to the side to vomit. Unbeknownst to them the noise drew attention elsewhere; the ambulance man was jumped and then mauled by the red-haired woman they thought dead. The ambulance woman started to back off in terror and then fled when the blonde stopped gorging on the old man and joined the attack on her screaming colleague …

In the space of ten minutes of the first infected person in London to turn there were four newly created zombies, ready to explore the late-night Farringdon bars and clubs. With the help of the reanimated ambulance man making his way into a drunken crowd outside a nightclub and the undead would-be samaritan attacking a group of stoned teenage girls in the underground station, the number of infected quickly rose to over fifty. From there it started to spread like a deadly tsunami across North London.

Very early the next morning Zan woke with a panicked shout in his Docklands flat. Rubbing his eyes he looked around his bedroom for any unwanted visitors. He shook his head and recalled the previous night. The call with Jack had prompted a series of actions. He collected all his most important personal effects into a rucksack and ran a bath of drinkable water in case he had to barricade himself in the flat for a few weeks. He made printouts of maps out of the city into Kent in case the networks went down. He unlocked his cabinet with his trophy-winning university cross-bow and folded it into his rucksack - only just fitting and no more. He quickly cooked and ate a hot breakfast and had a long hot shower in case the power went down. The realisation that he might never see his family or friends again suddenly hit as he got in. He sobbed loudly as he turned on the water. The roaring sound of the spray meant from outside the shower cabinet he was shaking and shuddering in apparent silence. Still in shock he disembarked the shower. It was 4.15am. He commanded the live news to show up full screen mode on whichever wall he faced, as he paced around making final preparations to leave.

“Jack was right,” he said softly, staring in awe at the wall sized, drone-cam of the unfolding mayhem in North London. Not a pixel was missed in the escalating battle between the armed police and the ‘cannibal criminals’ as iNews was calling it. Zan now knew better. They were about as criminal as Great Whites or the E-Bola virus. They weren’t calculating or evil, they just … were. They consumed and multiplied. Bestowing them with purpose made their actions comprehensible: meaning they could be reasoned with and stopped. The alternative was far more chilling. As Zan pondered this, the truth finally slid along the screen in the strap-line.

ACCLAIMED Author and filmmaker Max Brooks declares this ‘the Worst and LAST zombie outbreak’. LONDONERS URGED TO stay indoors. EMERGENCY Cobra meeting convened as cdc in the USA issues the following …

It was the first time that he saw the z-word being used. Holy shit this was actually happening, he thought, eyes wide and covering his mouth with his hand. On screen, in North London, the number of zombies had grown and started to overwhelm the armed response team. The police’s wild and ineffective gun-fire betrayed the terror of coming face-to-face with an apparently supernatural foe. They don’t stand a chance. Zan again thought of his friends and family. He hastily composed a group alert on his t-shirt to tell everyone he cared for to either barricade themselves in their homes and start saving food and water or get the hell out of London. He paused as he saw Angela in the To: list. He had a momentarily flicker of sadness. Am I going to try to save her? The girl who turned my life upside down and then disappeared when I fell from grace? He sighed. It was a message of safety. Her, I can to learn to forgive.

He pressed send and looked back up at the live news on the wall. The armed police had lost the battle and the drone cam was now tracking the remaining zombies. Then the horror really began. One by one the dead police shakily got to their feet and then stumbled off in search of prey. It was mere minutes after they had been slain.

There was no denying it now, Zan thought. This was going to engulf everywhere.

“Every-fucking-where.”

The strap-line then had various politicians and security heads urging calm, and other less reputable commentators calling for North London to be immediately firebombed to stem the infection. From Jack’s description of the source of the outbreak, that wouldn’t work, so Zan turned his thoughts to his own survival. They would be banging on his 12th floor door in the Docklands in a day, two at most, especially if the power failed and the security doors downstairs opened for safety. Zan laughed at the irony but stopped quickly. He felt insane laughing alone in his flat, watching a zombie plague spread across London.

From the evidence of the speed of infection he would soon be at the epicentre of the biggest fight for survival Britain had ever seen. It still didn't seem real but he willed that thought away before it got him killed. Any calm processing of the event would have to come later, once he was safe. He sat down as he began to feel detached and not … really there.

The way he saw it he had two choices. Number one would be to ride it out and stay where he was, barricading himself away for weeks until the food/water ran out. Then pillage what he could in the rest of the block and scavenge further and further, using his relative security of his flat. He had a crossbow if anyone got in his way; he didn't have the size or the strength for close-combat.

Number two would be to leave now, hightailing it out of London … like escaping the beach when he saw the water being sucked out in front of a tsunami. He was already half packed and ready for that. But the main problem he faced related to the conversation with Jack. The outbreak looked like its epicentre was North London, spreading outwards. In reality, if the wind blew the right direction a new outbreak could be in the main road outside. Or someone bitten in North London could already be spreading it across Kent. He stood at the window in his t-shirt and pants, eyes darting up and down the pre-dawn streets, trying to see signs of life … or otherwise. It was fruitless; he couldn't see a thing. Since they outlawed night-time street lighting his view of the stars was impressive but not of the ground. What if there was already a mass of undead outside? I’d never know until it was too late. But it’s madness waiting for one more minute, I must get going. He quickly finished getting ready, took one more look at his home for the last eight years, grabbed his rucksack and strode out the door …

He regretted it as soon as his feet touched the pavement downstairs. There were way more figures walking in the darkness outside his apartment block than was normal for 4.40am. In the darkness he could see the vague outline of dozens of moving shapes only a few metres away. He froze in heart-stopping terror. But then gasped with relief as he noticed their human-looking gait. Of course, it must be everyone with the same idea as me. In a couple of hours, once people check the early morning news, this trickle is going to become a flood. He briefly considered walking the 15 minutes to Canada Water tube station. There’s no way I’m going underground to be trapped with hordes of possible infected. He started walking south-east. Kent was fifteen klicks away. But after only twenty minutes’ walk, and some twenty years of watching movies about them, he came face to face with his first real, flesh-eating undead …

Zan and the growing crowd of hundreds of worried-looking Londoners slowly made their way through Greenwich and were walking en masse down Rochester Way. It was 5am and still pitch dark but sunrise wasn’t far away and the eastern sky already had an orange/red glow. The flow of vehicles had rapidly increased since he joined the exodus out of London. Pedestrians were still reluctantly moving out the way for cars but Zan didn’t see that lasting long. He was amazed at how many people had already decided to flee, but realised worried friends and relatives would be calling each other in the dead of the night after seeing the news flash on their pyjamas. The traffic was already nearly at the level and direction of 5.30pm on a Friday; drivers were furiously honking their horns at pedestrians taking over the road as they were forced to drive at the same walking pace.

One particular vehicle, a black Google sports-car about eighty metres ahead of Zan, stopped dead and its emergency flashing beacon and siren started. That could only mean one thing, Zan thought, a heartbeat inside the car had stopped. The noise was deafening; some in the crowd banged on the roof in frustration. Three minutes later Zan reached the side of the vehicle. He shuffled with the crowd past the bonnet then both car doors swung open behind him, pushing people aside.

Zan stopped walking and turned round to see who came out, his heartbeat rising as fast as his sense of dread. Two teenage boys slowly stumbled out covered in blood. They looked like twins; same dark hair, slender height and slacker clothes. Both had the same fixed unblinking stare and cloudy grey eyes. Their faces and necks were mottled grey as if covered in patches of dampness. As they walked round their open doors he could see their injuries. Others noticed too and screamed and hurriedly scattered in all directions. The boy at the front had a massive, still bleeding bite mark on his ear and neck whereas his twin had a deep gouge in his belly where his innards had slipped out and draped nearly to the ground in front of his shuffling feet. Watch out or you’ll slip on those! Zan thought madly.

Everyone in the crowd around the seemingly living dead twins had fled in howls and screams. What they had seen on their walls or ceilings at home had now appeared right in their midst. Zan stayed right where he was; his stomach was doing backflips and he could barely breathe. His morbid curiosity to see something up close that he’d only ever seen in movies was temporarily more powerful than his survival instinct.

The boy with his ear practically torn off was now just three metres away from Zan. The bedlam around him subsided as everyone had run into gardens or down both directions of the street. No-one stayed to fight. Zan was still rooted to the spot by the sight of this … dead … person shuffling towards him, right arm now outstretched. He finally caught his breath and stepped back, turned and fled, imagining for a chilling second the cold fingers touching his neck …

As he ran through the darkness, people around him crying, panting for breath and shouting each other’s names, he realised something deeply unsettling about what he had just witnessed. Zan had his cross-bow in his backpack and didn't even think to use it. Being up close to something so mind-bendingly awful, had stalled all rational thought. He felt star-struck by the zombie’s presence and incapable of calmly using motor skills to defend himself. The courage he thought he’d have folded completely in the face of such unaccustomed horror. Zan dimly wondered how his friends and family were doing … and felt heavy with a new fear for the future, and the survival of everyone.