No Zombies Please We Are British Read Free Page A

key into the lock of his front door.
    Jack collapsed the moment he crossed the threshold, falling to the hallway floor. He lay there a while, on his belly, his eyes closed. His world was spinning, his mind unable to process what it had seen now that he had distanced himself from it.
    His stomach cramped and he vomited over the floor, chunks of still-to-be-digested pizza crust floated before his eyes on a sea of regurgitated stomach contents.
    Crawling through the hall, aware that he was heaving his body through his own vomit but uncaring of the fact, Jack pulled himself to his feet in the living room. He stared out of the window, joining the ranks of the curtain twitchers he had seen in the other building.
    The trio were still out there, but had wandered off in their own directions. To the right, the well-dressed man with the expanded chest was alone, his killers long since disappeared, no doubt in search for fresh meat.
    The man himself was jerking on the street. His life returned to him in death. He thrashed in wild, jerky movements. Back from the dead and hungry for flesh, yet he appeared to be confined to the location of his demise, unable to right himself without assistance and that would surely never come.
    Falling back to the floor, a location he was getting overly familiar with, Jack closed his eyes and tried to block out the foul smell of partially digested undead human offal that was smothered over his face.
    “This can’t be happening,” he spoke aloud. “I’ve gone crazy. I’m dreaming, that’s it. I must be dreaming.”
    Pulling himself back to his feet, Jack scrambled to find his phone. He needed to get ahold of Sarah. There was still no service. Cursing, he turned back to the television.
    The first reports were still continuing with the story about rioters, but as he watched, the images filled the screen. All of them too fleeting to give even the most eagle-eyed viewers more than a second or two to take in the full-scale assault on the nation’s capital.
    It was only on the third run through the same edited footage that Jack noticed them. Figures within the crowd. Multiple points from which the mass exodus was produced. The riots were a cover. The rising dead were to blame. They were in the city, and from the look of it, in numbers far greater than he could believe.
    The pictures came around again, and the final penny dropped.
    “Motherfuckers!” Jack yelled at the television.
    On the fourth image of the riots, still an aerial shot but one made from a closer angle than the others, you could see a building on fire. It was a location that Jack knew well because it was where he had spent many hours of his youth, back when it was an internet café, and also the years after when it became a rather specialist computer supplier.
    The problem was, that building had burned to the floor during the 2011 riots. The structure had been saved, but was currently still undergoing renovation. Yet the burning image he saw was clearly still the computer shop.
    The realization was a stunning and sobering blow. At some point overnight, while he had been eating pizza and playing video games, the world had gone to hell in a hand basket.

 
    Chapter 2
     
    Jack showered and made himself another coffee, desperately trying to convince himself it was all fine. If he went through the usual motions, reality would catch up to him and everything would be fine.
    He listened as the screams continued outside. Sometimes there were but one or two, and at other times, it seemed as if the entire borough was yelling as a single pained collective.
    One by one, the television channels stopped broadcasting, using excuses pertaining to the riots. It was a rich story as several of the channels were not even broadcasted from London-based studios.
    Opening the front door of his flat, Jack looked out. The hallway was a long one with doors along either side. He looked left and right. Somewhere, someone was screaming. Inside their building.
    Jack