Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse Read online

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  Jack Cutter survived because a wall fell on him.

  He was running – running for his life – sweat staining the front of his t-shirt, his breathing labored. All around him the world was going to hell.

  And he didn’t know why.

  It had happened within a matter of moments. One minute he was parking his pick-up and walking towards the center of town under a clear blue sky – and the next he was struggling to stay alive as the street filled with hordes of screaming, terrified people, and the air overhead thumped with the heavy vibrating beat of helicopter rotors.

  The windows of a department store exploded outwards in a fireball of searing hot flame and deadly shards of glass. The shock of the blast was so fierce that the ground around him trembled and the sidewalk seemed to heave beneath his feet. A woman in front of him tripped and fell, and Cutter stumbled over her. The concrete smeared skin from his hands, and for a stunned moment he could only lay still, covering his face from the scattering feet and legs all around him. The noise was deafening; the panic-stricken screams of office workers, and mothers who clutched desperately at their children – all overlaid by the constant thump of the helicopters and the plaintive wail of car horns as horrified motorists abandoned their vehicles and fled the madness on foot.

  Cutter heard a sporadic volley of ragged gunfire from somewhere close behind, and the sound was enough to galvanize him. He struggled to his feet, bumped and jostled by the mindless horde.

  The scene was chaotic. Thick smoke was billowing from the upper stories of the burning department store, and he could see a woman in a white blouse at a third floor window. She was screaming, flailing her arms in a desperate plea for help. Then she just disappeared – violently jerked out of sight by a strong clutching arm.

  Overhead, two army helicopters were circling the madness, tilting in a series of sharp turns, and weaving above the city’s rooftops. Cutter heard a ragged burst of machine gun fire and saw the winking red flashes of light – and stood frozen and appalled as he realized the choppers were firing into the confusion.

  He turned and ran. The sound of the crowd’s panic undulated like a wave of noise, rising and falling like a heart-gripping herald of doom. Gunfire ripped through the air indiscriminately, stitching ragged fragments from the blacktop, and sawing though cars and people. The street billowed in fresh pyres of smoke and flame, and the crowd’s panic turned to hysteria.

  A four-wheel-drive suddenly broke from the jammed line of abandoned cars, shunting and crumpling its way up onto the sidewalk and scything a path through the teeming crowds. The desperate scattered, but those who were too slow to react were tossed over the hood like pieces of broken debris, or dragged under the savage tread of the huge terrain tires. The motor roared as the vehicle veered in wild arcs, crashing into benches and trash cans.

  Cutter heard the howl of the revving engine and turned just in time. He saw the wild, wide eyes of the driver behind the windshield. Saw the man’s mouth open in a roar of frantic panic – and threw himself sideways. He felt the fender of the truck smash his foot a glancing blow, and then he crashed into a doorway as the big roaring vehicle careered over the woman who had fallen in front of Cutter, crushing and killing her instantly.

  The vehicle rocked wildly on its suspension. The left side wheels became airborne and the right side wheels dug into the gutter in a wicked howl of smoke and rubber. The vehicle teetered sideways, its momentum carrying it into the front of a burger shop on the corner of the block. The collision stopped the vehicle dead, and the driver was hurled through the windshield head-first by the shocking impact. He was torn to pieces by the falling, shattering glass of the shop front, and his body impaled to the hood of his vehicle.

  The awning over the front of the building collapsed in a scream of rending metal and crumbling bricks. Cutter tucked himself into a ball and covered his head with his hands. Thick dust and debris enveloped him as the front of the building slowly began to fall and the noise around him sounded loud as the end of the world.

  For long moments of eerie, stunned silence, Cutter lay perfectly still. When he finally opened his eyes his world was a small tight space of rubble and billowing dust. He coughed, spat gritty dirt from his mouth, and dragged his hands across his face and eyes. He saw jagged shapes of daylight, and he kicked out at the debris that pinned his legs.

  Slowly he turned his head sideways. There was a dead man lying close beside him, his body cleaved in half by a ragged piece of iron. A warm pool of blood was leaking across the sidewalk, congealing into a brown kind of mud. Beside the carnage was the shape of another man in a white shirt and trousers who had his back to him. Cutter rolled onto his side and reached out with his fingers. The man flinched, and then raised a feeble hand to his face.

  Cutter sat up. Iron girders and broken masonry lay in fractured, twisted chaos all around him. He got to his knees, then hunched over and coughed again. He could see the side of the four-wheel-drive. The roof of the vehicle had been crushed flat under the weight of the awning. He could see the driver’s legs hanging limp across the hood, but nothing more.

  The man in the white shirt rolled onto his back and groaned. His face was a mask of grey dust, and there was a bleeding gash on his cheek. His shirt was covered in dirt and spattered blood, but he was breathing. Cutter crawled over the dead body and shook the man’s shoulders.

  “You all right?” Cutter croaked.

  The man groaned again.

  Cutter crouched over the man and pushed away a piece of iron sheeting. Through the space he could see the city street.

  Buildings were on fire. The air was thick with billowing clouds of black smoke, but overhead the army helicopters still circled vengefully, dipping low in strafing runs like prehistoric predators, their powerful rotors ripping through the haze as the machine guns continued to fire.

  Wrecked, mangled cars choked the street. Alarms sounded piercing and plaintive. People cried out in fear and pain. And on the sidewalk, not twenty feet away, Cutter noticed a woman in a grey business suit, hunched over the body of a young girl wearing a bright summer dress. The woman was drenched in blood, and for an instant Cutter thought she was trying to rouse the child and rescue it. Then he saw the woman’s head coil back, pause – and lunge at the child’s neck to gorge on the girl’s flesh. Cutter’s eyes went wide with horror and shock. He heard the woman snarl as she tore at the child’s body, and when the woman looked up again, her chin was dripping with blood that spilled all the way down her throat and soaked her blouse.

  The child was still alive. Cutter saw the girl’s thin brown legs thrashing. He watched on, numb with horror. Then the woman’s snapping jaws gouged a vicious snarling bite from the girl’s face and after another moment the child moved no more.

  Cutter felt his stomach heave and tasted thick oily bile in the back of his throat. He bunched his fists, filled with black unholy rage that defied reason. He cried out, shouting through cracked lips at the woman, and grabbed for a piece of twisted iron pipe that had fallen when the awning had collapsed.

  He took a staggering step towards the woman, and then suddenly felt a hand on his ankle, the grip fierce and desperate.

  “Don’t!” the man lying on the ground beside him gasped. “She’s one of the infected.”

  Cutter stared down at the man, incredulous. “Infected?”

  “The zombie virus,” the man said, his voice a dry rasp. “It’s been on the news. The whole of Virginia is being over-run.”

  Cutter shook his head, bewildered. He lowered the iron bar and felt a creeping icy numbness begin to spread through his body. He shook his head again, looked back at the woman – and then beyond her.

  He could see other figures moving amongst the streaming mass of humanity. Blood-drenched shapes moved slowly – shuffling in the throng, clawing randomly. He saw one of the figures clutch at a running woman’s shoulder and pull her off balance. The woman was young – maybe in her twenties. She fell on her back, h
itting the ground hard, and was suddenly set upon by two more shambling shapes that seemed instinctively to sense her. The woman had a pistol in her hand. She screamed in fear and fired three quick rounds, point-blank into one figure’s chest, flinging it back against the side of a car. But by then the other ghoul was tearing the young woman’s guts wide open. Cutter heard her scream once more – a loud blood-chilling cry of agony and terror – and then more running people swept past and he lost sight of the woman in the chaos.

  Cutter turned his attention back to the man lying at his feet within the debris of the wrecked building. The guy was groaning painfully, clutching at his chest, and despite the superficial cut to his face, Cutter was pretty sure the man had suffered internal injuries. The guy spat bright red blood onto the sidewalk and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He was shaking – maybe going into shock.

  “Help me,” the man pleaded. He was trying to claw himself upright. Cutter heaved him up, and felt his weight heavy against him as the man swayed on a damaged ankle.

  “Broken?”

  The guy shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said, then winced and looked around, as if to get his bearings. He pointed past Cutter’s shoulder. “The bookshop,” he said. “That’s where I work. There is a basement. We need to hide.”

  Cutter followed the direction of the man’s arm. Across the street he could see the shop front for ‘Newbridge City Books’. He shook his head. It was an old two-story building that had been built before the Second World War, with delicate ornate masonry around the upper floor windows and a wide display area on the ground floor beside a dark opening.

  “We’ll never make it,” Cutter said. “Not in this madness.”

  The guy sagged heavily. His arm was draped over Cutter’s shoulder. “We have to.”

  Cutter stared at the guy. He was in his early thirties, a thin, wiry shape with short hair and a long sallow face that was screwed up in the agony of his pain. But his eyes were clear and determined.

  Cutter nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  In the first few moments of madness, the crowd on the streets had moved like a tide of humanity, spilling onto the roads and sidewalks and moving like a mass in one direction that had swept Jack Cutter up and carried him away. But now the crowds had lost their cohesion and direction, so that to Cutter it now seemed like the street had degenerated into an urban warfare battleground.

  Pitched battles and running skirmishes were being fought as infected zombies clutched and dragged at the fleeing throng, and the victims turned and struggled with frenzied desperation for their lives. The screaming became louder, more piercing. The sounds of sporadic gunfire cracked and echoed between the tall buildings. Police sirens wailed in the distance, but never seemed to come closer – and through it all the remorseless clatter of the helicopters overhead tore at the air.

  Cutter kicked aside more fallen bricks and his boots crunched on broken glass until he was standing on the edge of the sidewalk. The infected woman who was hunched over the body of the dead girl glanced up at Cutter, sensing his movement. Cutter watched the woman and felt a tremor of superstitious dread.

  For long moments the undead woman watched him, her mouth open, and there was a dry retching sound in the back of her throat. Then she got to her feet and hissed.

  Cutter moved slowly. He picked up the iron bar in his free hand and hefted the reassuring weight of it. It was about three feet long, some kind of iron pipe that might have been part of a drainage or plumping system before the burger shop had collapsed. It was crushed and bent at one end into a crude jagged hook.

  With the man leaning heavily against him, Cutter stepped out onto the blacktop.

  The undead woman snarled. She kicked the young girl aside, and Cutter thought he saw the body twitch. Then all his attention went back to the blood-soaked woman as she started to shamble towards him.

  She was moving quickly, her gait awkward, like each step was a convulsion. Her body seemed to writhe and thrash. One of her legs dragged heavily, but her arms reached out, and her fingers seized into claws. Cutter watched in horror.

  On his own, he could easily outrun the woman. But weighed down by the injured guy, he knew there was little hope of escape. Cutter got as far as the middle of the traffic-choked street, and accepted they weren’t going to make it.

  He leaned the guy against the bullet-riddled hood of a small silver sedan. Through the shattered windshield, Cutter could see the body of a woman driver. She was slumped back in her seat, her face torn away, the skull shattered. Blood and gore had sprayed across the interior so it looked like some kind of abstract artist’s nightmare.

  “Wait here,” Cutter said. “And keep an eye out for others.”

  He turned back.

  The undead woman was coming closer, remorseless and relentless. No caution, no sense of awareness – just a mindless instinct to hunt and kill driving its steps and blazing in it’s yellowed jaundiced eyes. Cutter swung the pipe like a baseball bat and felt the solid sock of the weapon as it staved in the woman’s unprotected ribs. The impact jarred all the way up his arms, and the woman was flung sideways like a rag doll, sent crashing against the trunk of a Buick. Cutter swung again, this time with more momentum, and with his legs well balanced. The iron pipe hissed through the air and the jagged hook of the weapon buried itself deep into the woman’s back. It wailed in fury. It’s head turned on its shoulders and it’s eyes flashed with maddened rage. Cutter felt the icy chill of dread reach all the way to his heart and squeeze tight.

  He tugged at the pipe, but it was buried deeply into bone and muscle. He twisted it, and the undead woman turned and lashed out at him with fingers clawed like bloody talons. Cutter swayed out of reach and kicked out at the woman’s blood-spattered legs. She fell to the ground and the jagged hook of the pipe tore free. Cutter moved quickly. He stamped his foot into the middle of the woman’s back. The zombie flailed its legs and scrabbled at the ground with its hands. Cutter swung the pipe down hard, swinging it like an axe, and burying the hook into the undead woman’s skull.

  She went still. Didn’t move again. Cutter stood over the body for long seconds, breathing hard. He was shaking. His hands were trembling like a man in fever. Then he felt a hand seize his arm and he swung around wild with rage and fear.

  It was the guy. He was pointing across the street. “More of them,” he said.

  In the building beside the book shop, a woman was standing at second floor window. She was screaming hysterically. She had a baby clutched in her arms, holding the bundle of blankets close to her chest, while behind her a blood-covered figure was clawing and tearing at her body with its teeth. The woman shrieked and slowly collapsed. The baby fell from her grip, out through the window. It hit the ground with the sickening thud of breaking, crushing bones.

  Cutter turned away. He closed his eyes for just a moment and let the crazed madness of sirens and fire and screams and death wash over him like the shock wave after an explosion. He swayed, felt the world tilting at an impossible angle – but when he opened his eyes again he felt an instinctive surge of resolve and the need to survive. He hoisted the man’s arm over his shoulder and dragged his limping weight on towards the book store.

  Suddenly a roar of semi-automatic gunfire tore through the screams and chaos, and Cutter looked up in shock.

  There was a man by the entrance of the store, barricaded in the open doorway behind an upturned desk. He was a big guy, with huge muscled shoulders, wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves torn off. Cutter saw the man wave at him urgently. The man was shouting something but the roar of more gunfire drowned the sound out. Cutter saw a bright red muzzle flash of light, and then felt the hiss of air as bullets flew close past him. He crouched instinctively, dragged like an anchor by the weight of the man at his side, and then fell to his knees. The man slipped from his arm and rolled painfully to the ground.

  “Leave him!” the guy in the book shop entrance was shouting.

  Cutter glanced ov
er his shoulder. Undead figures were swarming towards him. They had been men and women, but now they were a walking nightmare of horribly disfigured, torn shapes, each moving stiffly and slowly, snapping their jaws and reaching out with clawed fingers towards him.

  Cutter grabbed frantically at the guy’s arm and tried to heave himself upright. The guy was like a leaden weight.

  The book store was just fifteen feet away.

  Cutter knew they weren’t going to make it.

  The undead shambled closer. One lunged for him but Cutter kicked out and drove the figure staggering backwards. Then he grabbed the injured guy’s arm and tried to drag him to his feet.

  More gunfire ripped around his head. He saw one of the zombies flung to the ground in a spatter of thick brown congealed ooze, and he heaved desperately at the injured man until he was upright and they were ten feet away from the store’s open doorway.

  The guy behind the barricade rose to his feet, standing like a colossus in the doorway. He was a man-mountain. He had a dark sunburned face, rugged features and a jaw like an anvil. He had long black hair down to his shoulders, but it was tied back by a scrap of material like a bandanna. There was a black nylon bag slung over his arm and some kind of a machine gun, tucked tight in against his shoulder. The weapon was aimed directly at Jack Cutter.

  “Down!”

  Cutter reached the curb. He heard the man shout, and he crashed to the concrete instinctively. Gunfire roared in a long ragged pulse of deafening noise. Empty shell casings spewed from the breach of the weapon in a heated arc – and then Cutter was dragging himself wearily back to his feet. He didn’t look around. He didn’t dare. He grabbed the injured guy’s arm and clenched his teeth with the last of his strength and the final reserves of his will and determination.

  Cutter heard a loud undulating moan close behind him. It was a sound that seemed demented and inhuman. He wrenched the injured guy to his feet – and made one last futile lunge to reach the bookstore.