No Zombies Please We Are British by Alex Laybourne Page B

sit directly on his shoulders, for he had no discernible neck holding his head in place. His lips pulled back in a grin revealing golden teeth. He had a large tattoo running across his upper chest. A simple and eloquent piece of body art. FUCK. The font made it look even more graceful.
    He sped away before Jack had moved from the spot, and as the car turned at the end of the road and disappeared, Jack lay his aching head back down. He was dizzy from the blow, and his face felt as if it were melting from his skull on the injured side. The heat from the initial strike gave away to a pulsating pain that was close to indescribable.
    Jack closed his eyes. His body shook, and in that moment, he was lost. His mind was scrambled, and everything he had fell away and got lost in the fog that was threatening to claim him.
    The hungry growls of the approaching undead went some way to clearing the lingering haze. Jack rolled over onto his knees, and raised his head.
    The first two pairs of undead hands were reaching for him. Both were largely skinless, the meat already starting to get a dried husk, like when you leave a steak unwrapped in the refrigerator.
    Jack walked backwards on his hands and feet, like some strange gymnast, and pushed himself to his feet in a display of strength and flexibility he never knew he had. The two creatures were both wearing the formerly white uniform of a crappy local football club. Their white shirts, now stained with the rusted colour of dried blood, were a giveaway as to their final moments. Even in death, the stench of beer was heavy on their breaths, only now it was seasoned with the odour of early rot.
    Jack jumped backwards, unarmed and outnumbered, Jack held no inclination to fight with the two men who each easily outweighed Jack’s meagre seventy-kilogram frame. A fresh snarl came from behind him. Jack turned and ducked just as a pair of arms closed in for a hug. A hug that would have ended a little too much familiarity if the flesh-hungry undead freak had had his way. The man was built much more like Jack. His thin frame dressed in the same formerly white uniform of a football club. His head was shaved, which meant there was no way to hide the large split in his flesh that ran from the middle of his forehead, up and over his dome and down to the back of his skull.
    Whatever had happened to him, it could not have been pleasant. As he lunged forward, the two flaps of skin lifted and tore a little. Jack had the horrible mental image of pulling the flesh from the skull down either side of the head until it met beneath the creature’s chin. He was not sure what good that would do, as it was certainly not going to kill a member of the undead. It was just the image his brain decided to produce.
    Instead, Jack chose a more primitive and less hellish manoeuvre, a shoulder tackle. He lowered his shoulder and ran. He hit the reanimated corpse, throwing all his weight behind it.
    It hurt like fuck.
    He was not expecting the dead to be so unyielding. Later, when he had the chance to reflect, he would realize how stupid that notion had been.
    Still, in the moment, he had simply closed his eyes and pushed, casting the slender thing aside and opening up a window for his escape.
    Running, his feet slapping against the concrete, Jack looked for an escape. His mind was blank. He had no idea where he was, and even though he had only travelled a minimal distance, he could very well have been in a foreign country.
    “Here, over here. Come on, hurry,” a voice called him.
    Jack stopped and looked around.
    “Yes, here, come on, be quick.” There was a sense of urgency in the words, which made Jack feel guilty for his lack of speed in locating their source. Looking around, he finally saw movement in a house down the street to his right. Turning, not giving himself time to think, Jack ran.
    The house was a middle number in a run-down looking terrace. The buildings narrow but tall, each with three floors, and possibly