It had taken a good twenty minutes for him to compose himself and to be sure nothing else was following. Using multiple sheets of toilet paper, he cleaned himself up as best he could, wiping the sweat on his forehead with his sleeve. Food poisoning, great. Just what he needed. Absolutely terrific. Exiting the stall, a vile odour following him out, he washed his hands and made his way to the exit. Things had changed in the twenty minutes he had been otherwise engaged. Walking out of the gent’s toilets, he saw people running. He heard their obvious terror. Edging towards the main shopping concourse, three women ran past him the way he had just come. One of them looked at him almost pleadingly, but she was dragged onwards by one of the other women. Why was she bleeding? He moved his head to follow them and turned back just as the thing chasing them rounded the corner appeared. Thing was as good a description as any to use for what he saw, and its eyes bulged red, blood dripping from its chin, staining its white shirt with a deathly map. Part of its scalp flopped down uselessly above one eye. It didn’t seem to care. Ryan hesitated, stepping backwards, and the thing stopped and hissed at him. He saw the crimson on its teeth, and it spasmed as it seemed to look him up and down with almost erotic delight.
“
Spreeead,
” the thing said, taking a step towards him, then another. Behind it, a body dropped from the floor above, landing almost gracefully on both feet, before it ran off out of sight. The thing in front of Ryan raised a hand in front of it and pointed at Ryan. Then with an ungodly howl, it charged at him, quickly bringing Ryan to the floor. Ryan was not a powerfully built man, and he felt himself easily pinned by his adversary. The thing brought its face close and belched into his face, making Ryan gag from the putrid stench that was almost visible. If Ryan hadn’t already evacuated his bowels, he would have done do then and there.
A soiled hand grabbed him by the neck, turning his head from side to side, and then the other hand grabbed him by the hair, restraining his head even as Ryan struggled beneath it. Then the thing lunged its head forward and bit off Ryan’s nose. It was not a clean removal, but took several seconds, and the jaws worked and mashed the teeth through flesh and cartilage. Ryan bucked, screaming in pain and terror, his hand hitting out against the cannibalistic attacker weakly, only for the thing to release him. It looked down at him for a moment, chewing its prize with obvious relish, and then swallowed. Almost smiling, the thing stood and turned to walk away, only to stop. It looked back at Ryan, still prostrate on the floor. It pointed at him again.
“
Spreaaad.
” Then it ran off, disappearing from his sight. Ryan tried to get to his feet, but only managed to stumble to his knees. Turning, he half crawled, half stumbled back to the gent’s toilets, and made it several metres before he felt himself grabbed from behind. Another creature grabbed him, twisting his now helpless body around, and it sniffed him. The new infected – a black man with half his left hand missing – licked Ryan’s face, and seemed to nod his approval.
“
Goooood
,” the creature said, and it dropped him from its grasp, obviously satisfied with whatever it was he was looking for, and made its way off into the ladies’ toilets. More screams ensued. Ryan touched his face gingerly and wept at the obvious damage. He got back to his knees and then to his feet and staggered back to the gents.
There were grown men crying in here, banging on the toilet stalls, demanding entry in the hope of some sort of protection from what was occurring in the station. Ryan didn’t know it, but the stall next to him had accommodated an infected, who had attacked those present just as Ryan had encountered the three women. Ryan ignored his fellow collateral and meandered over to the mirror, shock and pain bringing him to the edge of consciousness. Grabbing the edge of one of the sinks, he felt his legs buckle, and he came down smashing his chin onto the porcelain, blackness taking him to the floor. Nobody tried to help him. There were no heroes here. No good Samaritans. The only thing here was survival, and that was in very short supply today.
It was several minutes before Ryan came round. Another “thing” stalked past him leaving the toilets, paying him no attention. The thing only had one arm, and it left a trail of red ooze behind it. Its gait was somewhat uncoordinated, and it bounced off the wall several times. Ryan looked around to see a half-dozen men either dead or collapsed on the ground. One was moaning on the tiled floor, which was a lake of bodily fluids. All around him the walls were an artist’s gallery, as if Jackson Pollock himself had come in to paint his masterpiece with the spray from his own severed arteries.
His mind buzzed with confusion as he pulled himself up off the floor. Looking at himself in the mirror, he almost laughed as he saw his shattered face. His jaw was fractured and dislocated, and pain pounded through him. But the worst pain was not from his head, but from his stomach, and it grew like a furnace. He had no choice but to collapse back to the floor, and he curled up foetal style as bile began to churn towards his mouth. As the vomit expelled itself, it seemed to take his consciousness with it, and the mind that was Ryan quickly died, only to be replaced by a burning desire to seek out and feed. Before being shot in the head thirty minutes later by a grenadier guard, Ryan would go on to directly infect thirteen people.
9.43AM, 16
th
September 2015, Piccadilly Train Station, Manchester
Brian Pickering stepped out of the black cab and rushed to the railway station entrance so as to get out of the pouring rain. The sooner he got on that plane and away from this damp-ridden shit hole, the better he would feel. This would be his last time in the UK for quite a while, and he wasn’t going to miss the place, not for one second. Especially in this damp, rain-sodden city. Every second he spent here was a second too long as far as he was concerned.
He didn’t hear the scream that came from the road behind him, didn’t see the pack of seven children that ran feral towards the rank of taxis and bus stops. Out of the rain, he walked towards the packed escalator, dragging his wheeled black travel bag behind him, indigestion gurgling into his chest. He hadn’t even had time to have breakfast. He’d changed the time of the alarm on his smartphone to make sure he got up early enough to catch his flight, but had forgotten to press the save button. So he’d woken late and pissed off at his own stupidity.
As he stepped on to the escalator, there was another scream; this one he heard, and he turned his head as he began to ascend. There was a woman in the doorway behind him with two small children clinging to her arms. She was evidently trying to fight them off, but they clung on clawing at her, their jaws clamped into her.
“What the hell?” he heard someone say. Two more children ran into the station, wrapping themselves around the legs of an elderly railway employee, and he fell. One of the children sank its teeth into him, and the other got up and attacked a good Samaritan that had come to help. Chaos just blossomed at that very moment. Then the escalator stopped with a jolt. Someone had clearly pressed the emergency stop.
Brian looked up and saw four more children at the top of the escalator. They couldn’t have been more than seven years old, but with their bleeding eyes and devil’s blood stained faces, Brian felt fear float into his consciousness. The veneer of reality slipped. An elderly man at the top was the first to be bit, and as the reality of the situation began to dawn and the children began to descend, those at the top began to push their way back down. Only there were children at the bottom. An elbow caught Brian in the face, sending his glasses flying, and he felt himself lose balance. One of the children leapt from the top of the escalator and landed on the back of someone who was obviously a body builder, what were once small, fragile fingers clawing into the man’s hair. Catching the hand rail, Brian steadied himself, his nose bleeding. Someone began to push up against him, and stuck in the middle as he was, he began to get squashed. Then he heard the chorus of what were once children’s voices as in unison they all shouted the same thing.
“
We will spread!
”
9.44AM, 16
th
September 2015, Paddington Train Station, London
The voice told them what to do. The voice always told them what to do. The voice was them, and they were the voice. The whisper, the seductive words that flowed through their once-human minds like a lover’s seductive promise. The voice was them, and they were the voice, and every moment the numbers speaking grew. The voice grew louder, more insistent, more demanding as more infected minds joined the viral collective.
“
We will feed, we will spread.
” But the voice came from the remnants of human consciousness, and in those thoughts there remained a concept only basically understood by those who now yearned to feed their growing hunger. Strategy.
Yes, they would feed. Yes, they would spread, but they were not the mindless animals of horror lore. Something deep within told them to kill only the dangerous, to infect the rest. Of course, those they killed magically came back to life. Whilst some spread through the streets randomly, scattering the seed of the deadly infection throughout the city, others grouped together, concentrating on specific targets, areas of high human density. The contaminated milk at the Paddington Coffee House had infected about sixty people. Within minutes of their symptoms becoming fully expressed, each one of them had infected another dozen people via exposure to bodily fluids and through direct bites. Fifteen minutes after, each of these new infected had spread their gift to dozens more. And so the infection progressed, almost doubling every couple of minutes as the ticking time bomb of the infection rolled through the bodies of the exposed, steamrolling to those who were blissfully unaware.
And then the infected began to get smart, descending on the underground stations en masse. Over fifty forced their way down the steps of the Paddington tube station, into the main concourse, biting and clawing as they went. Those travellers at the bottom of the escalators faced a wall of panic as people tried to descend against the upward flow, trying to escape the terror that washed over them like a wave. In fact, that was exactly what the infected acted like, a wave, hurling themselves down upon the people below them, some sliding down the partitions between escalators. The civilians they infected, the underground employees they killed, tearing their throats out, leaving them to resurrect as the slower but no less deadly undead. “
We will feed, but for now, we spread.
” Stood at the top of the escalator some of the infected attacked directly, others vomited, raining contagion down upon the masses.
The Circle Line train was just pulling in when the panic hit the platform. With little room to move, the chaos pushed people against the side of the now stationary train, and the doors opened on those cramped inside. Some people died in the crush, others fainted. The driver, witnessing the chaos, had no idea what was going on. He couldn’t go anywhere; it would be too dangerous to those trapped against the side of his train. He tried to close the doors, but the safety mechanism prevented it, which meant he couldn’t go anywhere even if he wanted to.
It was the infected seven-year-old child that made it onto the train first. Once known as Chloe, loved by her parents who both now fought to bite and devour the flesh of the living, the tiny infected creature used her small size to her ultimate advantage. Crawling through the legs of those on the platform, biting and gouging all those she came across, she slithered onto the tube train, her face and clothes painted in blood. Several people had kicked out at her attacks, but she felt no pain, the broken nose and the gashed scalp of no consequence to her. The fact she was missing an ear didn’t even seem to register. Once on the train, she attacked in earnest. She thrashed and cut and clawed her way down the carriage, jumping along the back of seats and traversing monkey-like by the hand rails suspended from the ceiling. She took fingers and ears and flesh with her as she went, pausing on occasion to vomit her pestilence over the trapped masses. She directly infected over two hundred people on the train, the rest trapped on there whilst those around them quickly turned.
That one attack resulted in the infection of over five thousand people. And it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. Some of the infected even squeezed themselves past the train to get to the tunnels, even the rats fleeing from them as they spread almost unhindered through the tube network. The driver, sat safe behind his locked door, saw it all, although he wouldn’t survive to tell anyone about the sights he had seen. Although the infected never got to him, he likewise was unable to leave and he ended up dying of thirst. The train cabin became his tomb.
9.45AM, 16
th
September 2015, Euston Underground Station, London
“I hope Grandad likes the present I made him,” Stephanie said, clutching the wrapped parcel like her life depended on it. She held it to her chest with one hand, the other holding tight onto the guiding and protective hand of her mother. At just seven years old, she was still nervous about the bustling city she found herself in. It was much different to the sleepy little village she had lived all her life in. It was noisy, and it smelt. Sometimes it smelt bad.
“I know for a fact he will love it,” her mother Rachel said, guiding her onto the escalator that led up to their ultimate destination.
“Mummy, is Grandad very sick?” They both stepped onto the moving staircase and began to ascend. Rachel looked down at her daughter and gave her a reassuring smile.
“Yes, he is, rabbit. But the doctors are looking after him.” Stephanie scrunched her face indicating her displeasure. “What’s that face all about?”
“I don’t like doctors. They stick needles in you.” Her mother chuckled and gave her a playful hug.
“Yes, they do, but only when they need to make you better.” Rachel had always been honest with her daughter. It was the only way she knew how to raise the child. With the father dead in a war that never should have been fought five years ago, it was important to her that Stephanie realised there were good and bad things in the world. And she would have preferred to keep her away from the throngs of humanity that London so ridiculously represented, but her father’s heart attack had put those plans on hold. “Can you come, Rachel? The doctors don’t know if he will make it,” her mother had asked. Estranged from her parents, who had all but disowned her for marrying a black man, she hadn’t wanted to have anything more to do with them. She knew it was her father rather than her mother, but she also knew her mother would cower down to the whims of the domineering man. So no, she could have happily gone years without seeing or hearing from them. But death changes all that.
Holding the top of the escalator, holding her daughter tightly, she guided the girl off the moving steps towards the ticket barriers.
“Go on, rabbit, you can put your own ticket through.” She showed her where the slot was and watched amused as the small fingers struggled with the ticket. It eventually went in, and the child passed through, Rachel following in her wake.
“What if I didn’t have a ticket?” Stephanie asked.
“Then that man over there would come over,” Rachel said grabbing her child under the arms, “and he’d tickle, tickle, tickle you.” Stephanie squealed with delight as her mother tormented her, and an elderly woman passed by beaming with delight at the sight of the laughing child.
“Mummy, stop,” Stephanie giggled, “people are watching.”
The exit from the Euston Underground Station they chose was right near the hospital on Euston Road. It was busy, even for London. Two police cars with their lights and sirens going were trying to traverse the packed traffic. Stephanie stared mesmerised at the sight. She felt her mother grip her hand harder, and she looked up. Her mother looked troubled.
“Mummy, what’s up?”
“Nothing rabbit. You just stay close to me.” They stepped into the street and joined the crowd that seemed to Rachel strangely agitated. Gingerly, stepping between people, they made their way to the hospital entrance.
Rachel didn’t know when the panic started. But start it did. There was a shout from somewhere behind her, followed by a loud scream, and she turned her head in what she thought was the direction of the source. Someone with wild eyes ran past them on the actual road, followed by a second pedestrian.