Read Online The Z Infection by Russell Burgess - Free Book Online Page B

as much necessities as I could find. I started with the food
cupboards.  I emptied them of all the tins, pasta, rice and dried food and
bottles I could find.  They would last the longest.  There was no point taking
frozen food or things that would go off.
           Once I had sorted out that and put it into
boxes, I searched around for anything I could use as a weapon.  Knives were the
obvious things.  We had a good selection and I took them all.  I also found an
old air rifle and some pellets.  It wouldn’t be powerful enough to stop a man,
but if things got really bad it might come in handy for killing the odd rabbit
or bird.  Also in the garage, I found a tool my wife used for weeding.  It was
long handled and had a sharp pointed end.  I imagined it might come in handy so
I threw that in as well.
           When I was finished I went back into the house
and turned on the TV again.  There was a military man on the screen, telling
everyone that the army was in the process of deploying three thousand troops to
the city.  He asked that people stay off the streets and assured us that
control would be regained shortly.
           The channel then flipped over to cover a story
from New York.  An outbreak of similar disturbances there and in other cities. 
Washington DC, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, Cairo.  The list was
growing.  Places around the world were beginning to experience what Londoners
had been suffering all day.  And things would only get worse.
     
    Kareef Hadad
    18:30 hours, Friday 15 th May, Central London
           The thing I was most desperate to do, was to find
my wife and son.  Sophie and I had walked for about three miles, trying to put
as much distance as we could between us and the chaos we had left behind at
Covent Garden, but in the forefront of my mind was them.  I had to get home to
make sure they were safe and then somehow get them to safety.  I thought, in
the long term, about returning to my family in the Middle East, but I knew that
was a long way from happening at the moment.
           At various points during the day we were forced
to run or hide.  Several times we had to double back on ourselves, due to large
numbers of infected people, which frustrated me.
           Sophie wanted to try to find her boyfriend
too.  She had no idea where he was, only that he was supposed to have met her
just before the whole thing with the bus happened.  He could have been anywhere
now.  He might have escaped with some of the other crowds, or maybe he was
hiding somewhere.  Of course the other possibility was that he was dead already,
along with a lot of others.
           We made our way to a small restaurant, just
around the corner from Russell Square.  It was owned by my friend, Saeed.  We
were both tired and hungry and we needed somewhere safe to rest for a while.  It
was the closest place I could think of. 
    It was empty when we arrived and he
was sitting in the main seating area, watching television on a wall behind a
small bar.  He looked at Sophie with some suspicion but he poured us two
coffees anyway and we sat down to watch the unfolding drama.  I asked if I
could borrow his car, but he told me he had already loaned it to his
brother-in-law.
           We chatted for half an hour as he made us a
snack and we recovered from our exertions, watching the news bulletins from
time to time when something particularly interesting came on.
           When it was time to leave we wished each other
well and we stepped back out onto the street.  That half hour stop had
recharged our batteries, but it had also put us in real danger. 
    We didn’t know it at the time, but so
many infected people had managed to get onto trains on the underground and had
spread the disease around the city, far quicker than anyone could have
imagined.  Those people were turning, or rising, on board the trains, turning
the carriages into charnel houses and