Sudden Death: A Zombie Novel by James Carlson Page B

my hand,” Muz urged.
    Shakily, the woman placed a foot on the wooden rail and tried to launch herself upward with her other wobbly stick of a leg. She was so skinny and bereft of muscle, as the tightness of her jeggings revealed, that she failed to reach high enough.
    The front door finally came crashing in now and a madman with a labourer’s build, his arms a mess of bite marks and missing lumps of flesh, came sprinting up the stairs after the woman. He could literally smell her fear, the perspiration running down her back, the stink of her unwashed armpits and crotch, and it drove him wild.
    Normally , he would not have been consciously aware of the woman’s subtle odours. That was not to say that his senses were now somehow keener. It was simply that the mental affliction he was suffering had shut down most of the higher cognitive processes that normally flooded the human mind. His mind now a blank canvas, his thoughts few and far between, he was much more readily able to take notice of his senses.
    Muz lunged dangerously lower out of the hatch, so as to reach further down to the woman, anchoring himself with his feet braced against the beams. The woman l eapt one last time and now their hands met. Muz almost crushed her delicate fingers in his grip and she yelped in pain. Thankfully, this bag of bones was as light as she looked and the copper was able to haul her up. Still in a panic, the woman reached upwards with her free hand, to grab at anything she could and pull herself up. Her grip found Muz’s hair and his right earlobe.
    “Jesus. Fuck,” Muz screamed against the white pain the woman hanging off his ear caused.
    He managed to keep his eyes open and saw the madman on the landing now, reaching up to grab the woman’s scrawny legs.
    “Kick,” Muz shouted at her. “Kick him in the bleeding head.”
    The woman clawing herself up his body began thrashing her legs around in the air beneath her. Several times her feet connected with the hulk of a man’s ugly head but the blows were feeble and had no effect on him whatsoever. Her lower limbs were flicking around like those of a dying spider however, which made it impossible for the enraged madman to get a hold of her.
    Eventually , the woman managed to pull herself up Muz’s body and into the loft. Muz himself however was still hanging precariously head first over the landing. The crazed man, hungry for meat, turned on him now, jumping to grab his head but missed.
    Several beads of sweat dripped from Muz’s forehead and landed in the other man’s open mou th. The taste drove him insane with raging desire and he leapt again, higher this time. Muz managed to pull himself back just in the nick of time, avoiding the grasp of the man’s shovel-like hands. He rolled over and gasped rapidly.
    “ Thank you,” the woman whimpered.
    She was already curled up against the wall farthest from the hatch, terrified of the man beneath them, who was growling menacingly, unable to co-ordinate his thoughts enough to figure out how to get up to them.
    “My… bloody… ear,” was all Muz could manage to say.
    In his exhaustion, he neglected to keep his weight on the beams, and without the slightest warning, the ceiling gave under him. Muz’s legs fell through the broken panels. The only reason the rest of him didn’t follow was that he managed grab the lip of the hatch and the beams around him. Before he was able to pull his legs back up though, the man below had him by an ankle, in an unbreakable grip, and yanked him through the hole with one deft tug.
    Muz slammed shockingly hard against the bare wood floor of the landing and his lungs deflated. Still gripping his ankle, the man towered above him, insanity burning in his eyes. Muz emitted a pitiful whooping sound, as he tried to refill his lungs, already feeling dizzy from the lack of oxygen.
    His assailant wasted no time and immediately fell upon him. The sudden pressure of the man’s substantial weight pressing down