Necropolis Rising by Dave Jeffery

the Jackal, and its occupants. The thong stopped for a few seconds, Shipman looking into their yellowed eyes; the twilight within them, the death.
    There were so many different people, the young, the old, those in between; from all walks of life, but united in death. Shipman spotted a woman, her left breast exposed, her dead, bloodied hand still clutching a small, vanity mirror. The glass was a web of cracks. Next to her was a man without trousers, his genitals swinging in a pendulum motion. Next to him: another man, his body part dirt part putrid flesh, his mouth, clogged and blackened with soil, his mourning suit moldered and ripe with post mortem juices.
    It was a passive moment, where the enormity of what may lie ahead for mankind should they fail was underscored in triplicate.
    Then, as one, the zombie horde opened their collective mouths and groaned. And began to move.
    “ Orders, Sir?” Honeyman called from behind the gun.
    “ Clear a path, Honeyman!” Shipman shouted as twenty or so zombies began to gather ahead of them. “Shoot to kill, Sir?” the gunner asked with a wry smile.
    “ Just get on with it, soldier!”
    The blast from the gun was loud in the dead, desolate streets. The muzzle flashes flickered in the shop windows; spent cartridges tinkled incongruously as they hit the sidewalk.
    Shipman observed the tracer fire as the heavy machine gun spat its fury into the crowd, literally shredding the undead, a few incredulously stood their ground before the shells punched holes into their skulls, knocking heads from shoulders the way wooden balls take out coconuts at a fairground shy.
    And then there was the blood, a great spray - dark and copious - painting the street, the glass, the grey stonework. It pooled under the bodies as they collapsed, but those who had not been hit in the head either climbed back onto their feet, or wallowed in the bloody mire, like the drowning swimming against the tide.
    From his seat at the front of the Jackal, Shipman pumped bullets into the skulls of those that Honeyman had missed.
    Then Alpha Team was moving again, its urgency to put distance between the living and the dead matched only by the need to find the youth with the potential to put an end to it all.
     
    ***
     
     

10
     
     
    Suzie Hanks found Kevin O’Connell to be a man of surprises. This notion came very early on in their relationship where the man who had promised to kill her abusive father, pulled up in an Aston Marten, James Bond style. He invited her out on an impromptu date. She half expected a grand casino to be waiting at the end of their car journey, but instead there was a Learjet.
    “ Where are we going?” she’d asked incredulously.
    “ I told you: on a date,” he’d replied smiling broadly.
    They were in the air for two hours and ten minutes before landing at Madrid Barajas International Airport; clearing passport control in five minutes flat.
    O’Connell hailed a cab and told the driver to head for the Museo del Prado; Madrid’s prestigious museum and art gallery, where the world’s finest collection of European art stood for the admiring public. The taxi had covered the 15 kilometers within ten minutes and Suzie gasped at the museum’s ornate facade, with its multiple archways and expansive courtyards.
    Here they sauntered through high white halls and galleries, exploring ancient works of beauty, exploring each other’s likes and dislikes and finding that by the end of the afternoon, their world had become one; united and indistinguishable.
    It was in one of the galleries that Suzie found “The Triumph of Death ” painted in 1562 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She stared at the painting’s themes of Death culling mankind with macabre fascination; the way one feels guilty watching someone’s misery at a distance: the dazed people standing by their over turned car, the woman crying on a park bench. Bruegel’s oil-on-panel rendition showed flames and bodies and Death on a killing spree,