The Z Infection (11 page)

Others were pushing past them to get
to us, reaching out and uttering those awful wailing sounds, as if their souls themselves
were in torment.  Two of the armed officers aimed at the crowd and fired
several shots.  One or two missed their mark, or struck bodies, but several hit
home in the centre of the forehead.  Those ones dropped to the ground and
didn’t move again, but for every one we stopped there were another ten to take
their place.

I joined the fight with a golf putter
I had found in someone’s office.  I lashed out at one woman and clearly broke
her jaw with it.  She just turned and looked at me as if I had hit her with a
feather.  It was demoralising.

For half an hour we fought them off. 
Swiping and kicking at them, forcing the ones at the front back, into the mass
behind them.  Occasionally we managed to kill one with a well-aimed strike, but
as often as not we were dealing non-lethal blows.  When the ammunition for the
hand guns ran out I knew we were in serious trouble.  We were tiring, while
those things seemed to have a limitless supply of energy and kept coming at us.

Inevitably mistakes crept in through
fatigue.  One of the civilian staff, a female typist, got too close and was
grabbed by her clothing.  She frantically held out her hand to one of the
others, looking for a saviour, but it was already too late.  The mob dragged
her screaming, into the body of them and tore at her apart in front of us as we
watched helplessly.

That sight made many of the others
give up.  They turned and ran.  I called to them to stay where they were, but
it was futile.  And the mob seemed to be driven on by their success.  They
surged forward again and another two women, who had remained, were also cut
down.   

With our losses growing and the rest
of us tiring, we fell back through the doors and into the corridor.  We tried
to barricade them with whatever came to hand, using tables and chairs to block
the way, but the force against us was too great.

Before long they had forced an
opening and were clambering through.  I managed to fell another one with the
golf club, hitting it so hard that I broke the shaft.  Another of the officers
was knocked to the ground and set upon.  They bit him so many times I lost
count, tearing off flesh as he screamed and tried to crawl to safety.  Another
one lost.

And now something else took my
attention.  I could hear the sounds of another disturbance coming from inside
one of the offices, where some of the staff had taken shelter.  I opened the
door to see a middle aged woman on top of a younger one, clawing at her.  The
younger woman was doing all she could to fight her off as the rest of the
office staff backed into a corner. 

I picked up a chair and smashed it
over the older woman’s head.  It had almost no effect.  She turned and snarled
at me and I must admit I stepped back a bit.  It was unsettling, to see how
quickly some people could be turned.  She had most likely suffered a major bite
during the melee on the stairwell, but had managed to get into this side office
before the virus had taken control of her body.

I staggered back out of the office
and into the corridor once more.  There were only one or two of us left.  The
older officer was still swinging the table leg every time one of them got close
to him, while another man was doing his best to stop two of those things from
finishing off a woman who was badly injured.  There was no point, I thought,
she would be one of them in minutes.

I ran back along the corridor,
realising that the fight was finished.  There were other floors above us, but I
knew that they would suffer the same fate as ours in due course.  I found an
office and locked myself in.  I had nothing.  No weapon, apart from what was
left of my golf club.  That wouldn’t last long.

I opened the window and breathed in
the air of the city.  It was different now.  It smelled putrid and foul, like
death.  A shadow was hanging over us.

Down the hall the last screams of the
final few survivors melted away.  I waited for my turn.  They were coming for
me.  I could hear them in the corridor.  They knew I was here, in the office. 
They could sense me.  Maybe they could smell me.

Then the door began to shake as they
pounded on it, demanding my death.  I had nowhere to go.  I admired the view of
the city, for what it was worth.  I wondered what it would be like in the
morning.  I wondered how many would survive the night.

Then, the door gave way.  They were
in the office, four of them, heading right for me.  I swung the club and caught
one above the eye.  Another one grabbed at me and I put my hand around his
throat to stop him biting.  Then the other two leant their weight to the fight
and felt myself losing my balance.  I fell, backwards, trying to get purchase with
my feet and not finding any. 

Then we were through the window and
falling.

Dr Richard Bryson

03:30 hours, Saturday 16
^th
May, Westminster,
London

By about three thirty in the morning,
we were ready to try to catch our first victim.  Si’s plan was simple.  We
would use live bait to draw one in, then we would use a noose-like device he
had fashioned, from a pole and some rope, to snare one around the neck.  We
should then be able to hold it at arm’s length while we bound its arms behind
its back.

It had taken a while, to locate the
bits and pieces he would need to construct his noose, but eventually Si had all
the parts and we were ready.

       ‘What about transporting it?’ asked Tony.

       Si thought for a moment.  He obviously hadn’t
considered that part of the problem, but he found a solution quickly.  That was
one thing those guys were really good at.

       ‘We tow it behind us.’

       ‘How do we do that?’ asked Taff.  ‘It’ll never
be able to keep pace with the car.’

       ‘We’ll have to drive slowly,’ admitted Si. 
‘Those things don’t seem to get tired, so that shouldn’t be a problem.  I can
keep it at a distance by keeping it on the pole.  It could run alongside us.’

       Taff looked at me.  As if I was in charge.  As
if I somehow knew any more about all this than they did.

       I shrugged my shoulders.

       ‘Worth a try,’ I said.

       ‘Where do we take it?’ asked Shaky.

       This was something else we hadn’t considered. 
Did we have anywhere that would be safe?  Did we have somewhere which was
secure enough to keep one of these things while I studied what had gone wrong
with it?

       ‘We’ll go to Earl’s Court in the first
instance,’ said Taff, back in control.  ‘We can decide what to do with it once
we get there, but I’m thinking maybe a police station or something similar.’

       So, we were ready.  I volunteered to act as the
bait, but Taff wouldn’t have it.  He saw me as being too valuable to be risked
and he insisted that one of his men would do that job.  In the end it came down
to either Tony or Shaky, because Si was going to be the noose man.

       Shaky was the one who stepped up, joking that
Tony was getting on in years and would find it too exhausting.  They fired one
liners back and forth at one another as we readied ourselves.  I suppose it was
a way of releasing the tension.  Despite the supreme professionalism of these
guys, I could tell they were nervous.  This was an enemy unlike any they had
faced before. 

       We found a quiet street on the north bank of
the Thames, close to Westminster.  Those streets would normally have been busy
with people at all hours of the day and night, but now it was deserted.  The
street lighting was still operating and it bathed the scene before us in an
eerie glow.  There were abandoned vehicles everywhere, forsaken in the panic of
earlier.  A double decker bus lay on its side, toppled by an unknown force. 
The windows were smeared with blood on the inside.  God knows what nightmare
had gone on inside there.

       We ran at a crouch, through the debris and
bodies of those who had failed to escape, until we reached a small delivery van. 
It was empty.  The driver had fled when the swarm had passed through this way. 
Tony checked the street and gave a silent hand signal to Taff.

       ‘There’s one over by the park,’ he said. 
‘Looks like a straggler.’

       I poked my head around the side of the van. 
There was a woman kneeling on the pavement.  She was eating something that was
lying on the ground.  I couldn’t see properly but I guessed it was the remains
of another victim.

       ‘Okay,’ said Taff.  ‘That’s the target.  Tony
will get her attention and draw her towards us.  Si will use the noose to grab
her and me and Shaky will provide cover in case there are any others lurking
nearby.  Once the noose is on we need to act quickly and bind her arms behind
her back.  Everyone clear.’

       All four of us nodded silently.  My heart was
racing and I was sweating, despite the coolness of the night air.

       ‘Right,’ said Taff.  ‘Go.’

       Tony stepped out from behind the van and began
to walk towards the woman.  At first she didn’t notice him and continued to
eat, but as Tony got closer she seemed to sense his presence.  She couldn’t
have heard him because he was like a cat, silently stalking his prey.

       She turned and saw him and he stopped, standing
absolutely still.  She stood up.  She was probably about late teens, wearing
jeans and a tight tee shirt.  She would have been an attractive girl earlier in
the day, drawing admiring glances from young men.  But now she stood there,
covered in blood as pieces of flesh fell from her mouth, examining what she
must have thought was going to be her next meal.

       Tony stood his ground as she walked towards
him.  She was making that characteristic low moaning sound as she came, the
sound that would exist in millions of nightmares for years to come.  It was a
sound I heard in my own dreams on many occasions.

       He backed up as she got closer, weapon at the
ready in case he needed it.  We had already decided that all these things were
expendable.  If we were having difficulty with one we would move to another
target.  Our safety was paramount.

       Tony continued to back off as she stumbled
towards him, leading her towards the side of the van where Si lay in wait with
his trap.  As he drew level with us he suddenly sprang into action and lassoed
her around the neck.  Before she could react to him he had tightened the noose
around her throat.  Any normal person would have suffocated with the tightness
of it, but not her.  Instead, she let out the most horrific howl I had ever
heard.

       ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Taff.  ‘Shut her up.’

       Tony hit the girl on the side of the head with
the butt of his rifle.  It had no effect as she continued to howl and thrash
around, as though she was incensed that she had been captured.

       ‘That’s not going to work,’ I said.  ‘You can’t
knock her out.’

       ‘Get her arms tied,’ shouted Si, as the demonic
creature grabbed for him.  She was out of reach but he was struggling to
control her as she thrashed and flailed.

       I threw Tony the extra piece of rope and he
grabbed one of her arms.  She swung at him, trying to claw his face, but missed
as he ducked.  I raced forward and took her other arm and together we managed
to get them behind her back and Tony bound them together and tied a quick knot.

       She was still howling like a demon possessed
and we had a bit of a walk to get back to the car.  It was made all the more
difficult by her, as she carried on desperately trying to get free so that she
attack us.

       It took us almost ten minutes to walk back to
where we had left the vehicle.  When we arrived there Taff stopped and stared. 
I walked right into the back of him, not noticing he had halted.  When I
finally looked up I saw what he could see.  Hundreds of infected, on
Westminster Bridge, crossing towards us.

       I don’t know if our prisoner could see them
too, or if she even acknowledged that those things were the same as her, but
she let out a screech that almost pierced my ear drums.  It was as if she was
calling them to us, telling them where their prey was.  It was chilling.

       ‘Up there,’ said Taff, pointing past Big Ben.

       We started walking as fast as we could, towards
Parliament Square, but soon stopped again.  Another group were coming towards
us from that direction.  We were being surrounded.  It was almost like they
were working together to snare us in a trap.

       ‘Back down, along the river,’ ordered Taff.

       Shaky fired a couple of rounds at one of them
as it got too close.  The man was hit in the chest and throat and knocked
down.  It was the scariest thing I ever saw, as he slowly got back to his feet
again and carried on towards us.  Can you imagine that?  You are surrounded by
an army of the infected and there seems to be nothing you can do to stop them.

       Tony fired another round and caught one of them
in the leg, shattering the bone.  That had no effect either, the thing just limped
instead.  They obviously didn’t feel pain anymore and fear didn’t enter their
minds.  All they wanted was us.

       Then, as we retreated along the river bank, our
last route of escape was suddenly cut off as another group appeared from around
a corner.  I looked at Taff, silently asking for his leadership.  There were
way too many to fight.  They were closing in around us.  Tony whacked one with
his rifle and Shaky felled one with a round to the head as Taff made the only decision
left to him.

       ‘The river,’ he said.  ‘It’s our only chance.’

Claire Samson

03:45 hours, Saturday 16
^th
May, Central London

       If you have ever been alone and I mean really
alone, where there is nobody there with you and you truly believe there is no
earthly hope of you ever having a visitor.  When there isn’t a soul in the
streets outside, there are no planes in the sky and you feel like you might be
the last person on Earth.  That’s when you begin to take stock of your life. 
What you’ve achieved, what you would still like to do.  What you didn’t do.

       Someone once told me that you should never
regret the things in life that you have done, only the things that you haven’t
done.  It was good advice.  Why look back with anger at mistakes?  Often there
was nothing you could do to fix them anyway.  But when you are stuck in a small
flat, with a lot of time on your hands, your mind tends to drift to what you
might have done differently.

       My biggest regret was staying on the tube for
the extra stop.  It meant I was caught up in the disaster of central London. 
But, I reminded myself, there was nothing I could do about that now. 

       My second mistake was coming here.  Before long
I had realised that I was now trapped.  There was no movement out in the
streets any longer.  The infected had moved on, away from the area to seek
easier targets.  There wasn’t a sound in the building either and I assumed that
most, if not all, people had ignored the government advice to stay put.  It was
looking like I might have been the only one who had followed that advice.

       The only thing I had for comfort, if you could
describe it as such, was the television, which was reporting on one disaster
after another.  The whole of central London was in chaos, Heathrow Airport was
locked down.  There were sporadic incidents around some of the suburban areas
and the contagion had spread to the south of the river.  The advice was to stay
where you were, unless you were outside the city centre.  Wait for the
authorities to regain control.  Wait for help to come.  It was on its way, they
said.

       More worrying, was that there were now reports
of outbreaks in other cities around the country.  Manchester, Birmingham,
Bristol, Sheffield, Cardiff and Glasgow all reported similar disturbances.  And
it was becoming a global problem.  The USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Egypt,
Australia.  The lists seemed to go on and on.  It seemed we were not alone.

       The only contact I had had with the outside
world was with Rupert.  He was still working away in his office, collating
reports from the newspaper’s staff and updating the website every half hour. 
The last couple of times I had tried to contact him I hadn’t managed to get
through.  I decided to try again before I attempted to get some sleep.

       The phone rang for a long time and I think I
held my breath until he finally answered.

       ‘Rupert Etherington,’ said the familiar voice.

       I exhaled.

       ‘Rupert, it’s Claire.  How are things with
you?’

       His voice was tense and strained.

       ‘Not good,’ he said grimly.  ‘I’m afraid the
offices are cut off.  The area was overrun about three hours ago.  There’s no
way out at the moment.’

       ‘The government are telling people in the
infected areas to stay where they are,’ I said, hopefully.  ‘They say they will
be regaining control soon.’

       He was quiet now, as he often was before he
delivered something he thought you didn’t want to hear.

       ‘I’m not certain that will happen any time
soon,’ he said finally.  ‘My contact in Whitehall tells me that the situation
is grim and that they are unlikely to be able to resolve it as quickly as they
had first hoped.  You might be better off trying to get out, if you can.’

       I looked out of the window at the dead
firefighters and police officers lying in the street where they had fallen.  If
they had been so easily overcome, what chance would I have?

       ‘I’m not sure I can make it,’ I said.

       He was silent again, this time for much longer.

       ‘I’m going to remain here,’ he said at last. 
‘I have a duty to get as much information to the public as possible.  I can’t
tell you what to do, but if you are safe where you are then I think you should stay
there for as long as possible.  I’ll stay in contact with you for as long as I
can.’