A Killing Spree And Some Bloody Zombies: Jake Rodwell Investigates, #3

By Jon Lymon

Bluff Cove. Cornwall. The unwitting epicentre of a bloody zombie uprising, freakish alien landing and fake chemical spillage is now in lockdown, armed forces taking out the remaining isolated pockets of zombie activity.

Battling not to join the legion of the undead is PC Jake Rodwell. Nursing a zombie bite, he's straddling the chasm between life and death.

As the criminal underworld smells blood and moves in to rid itself of his scourge, Rodwell is ready to jump into the abyss. But Bannen's news about Rodwell's wife and daughter forces Rodwell into a battle to remain human and fight his way out of Bluff Cove. His mission: to rescue his daughter from the clutches of a force even more destructive than the encroaching zombie apocalypse.

A KILLING SPREE AND SOME BLOODY ZOMBIES brings a flesh twist to the zombie genre, exploring the parallels between zombification and ageing, while ensuring readers hungry for a diet of flesh-ripping bites and head-turning decapitations get their fill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Lymon
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393244363

Jon Lymon

The truth isn't stranger than my fiction.Jon Lymon writes thrillers for adults and cute animal stories for kids, though one day he might swap that around. He lives in south London and likes cheese, and biscuits. But not cheese and biscuits.

Book preview

THE DIAMOND RUSH

LAST  NIGHT AT  THE  STAIRWAYS

THE WRONGED

A DEAD CHICK & SOME DIRTY TRICKS

A BIG BLUFF & SOME GREEN STUFF

A KILLING SPREE AND SOME

BLOODY ZOMBIES

© 2020 Jon Lymon 

CHAPTER 1

Rodwell tasted blood. Not his own. 

In a panic, he scooped a handful of fresh-fallen Cornish snow from the blizzard-swept field. Swallowed the icy crystals before they stained crimson.

Awkwardly straddling the chasm between life and death, Rodwell trudged across the West Field of Bluff Cove as night fell, seeking shelter on Christmas Eve, his brittle legs shin-deep in white stuff that cast a cloak over frost ravaged soil. He scented human flesh, both undead and alive, wafting in air flecked with snow blown in coils by a biting, howling easterly.

But the wind was not alone in howling. He howled. The pain of bitter cold snapping at his dying flesh, his pores feeling big as bullet holes, inviting the chill to envelop bones splintering under the strain of being upright. A pain beamed from the epicentre of his shoulder, stinging in firework flashes of seizure down his back. Each made him howl louder.

But, his abandonment of his daughter and wife hurt even more.

The bite on his shoulder burned a reminder. Rodwell was turning. He had to find shelter, somewhere to rest before the hunters swarming Bluff Cove blew his brains out.

CHAPTER 2

Icicles pointed down from the gum of the ledge above the barn entrance like sharp jagged teeth. Rodwell's hands deep red from cold, sprouting patches of disturbing green from infection, throbbed as he reached to push open the door, the move sending a stab of shock down his back which brought forth another howl of pain. He pushed on frozen wood, unsure if the creaks were the door or his bones.

Inside he sought hay, not for warmth but disguise. He could not let anyone see him like this. They would shoot on sight if armed or run for their lives if not. He staggered across a floor dampened by snow dripping through the pepper pot of holes in the roof. Stabs from bird beaks and the rot of ageing. This was no place for a man to die. But he knew that even when he died, he would return. And kill more.

Slumping into a dark recess, he scattered strands of damp hay over himself, alarmed by the rasp of his lungs which felt like burning paper bags in his torso. He pulled more hay over his wet clothes. The relief of not standing, of not being out in the open, on show and susceptible to pot shots from the American soldiers hunting down his like all over Bluff Cove allowed a release of tension. Soon replaced by a desperate need for sleep.

His stomach was an electric circuit board of pains, his conscience a quivering mess of doubt. Where was this blood he was still tasting coming from? What had he devoured in his snow blurred haste to get away from the car, ripping into fur with hands he’d since desperately licked clean of blood.

Who the hell had he eaten? 

Rodwell’s eyelids weighed heavy, each blink stickier than the last. Sleep was coming for him like the soldiers. He dug his nails into the fleshiest area of thigh he could find to keep himself awake, but he was devoid of feeling. Legs like wood. 

He would wait here to turn, lying like a corpse minus its coffin. He’d sensed others out there, full-gone, totally-turned, hiding from the Americans and local police, biding their time, waiting to strike back in a zombie uprising that would change everything.

CHAPTER 3

Two murders, three attempted, seven Actual Bodily Harms, six Grievous Bodily Harms, numerous assaults, threats, and blackmails. Despite them all, Duke The Duke Nelson insisted that the worst thing, the most nerve wracking thing he'd ever done in his life was get old.

He’d faced-down a pistol-toting, balaclava-sporting assailant outside his Kent mansion and felt less nervous. He’d felt less nervous when his neck reflected the silver of a machete held to his throat by a jaw-clenching, revenge-vowing teen in way above his head with the front to break into the back of The Duke’s Porsche Panamera. Duke The Duke had even been pinned down by four masked men, one swinging a mallet like a pendulum next to his head. But none had made him as fearful as he was now of his own seventy-three year old body. Waning since its forties, it was now tumbling into an abyss Duke The Duke did not wish to follow it into, serving up surprise pains, shocks of numbness and periods of dizziness that baffled successive doctors, a brave few putting it down to nerves shredded by fifty years of looking over the shoulder, dodging the bullet, evading the law, bottling up the truth, and regularly facing death.

Doctors who mentioned nerves soon found themselves requiring medical assistance of their own. Duke The Duke would not have anyone accuse him of nervousness, and directed his six-foot-seven Swedish bodyguard, Svenlen, to administer retribution. Bloodied and battered doctors were forced to hear Duke The Duke insist he was nerveless with nerves of steel, a claim that didn’t tally, though not a single physician mentioned it, their blood-filled mouths preventing speech. Only Dolores, the Duke's wife, was allowed to disagree with him. And she never mentioned nerves.

There were times when Duke The Duke was convinced he remained the most feared criminal in southern England. For several years in the late Nineties, he had been. Steady his hand that slit the throat, aimed the crossbow, applied the lash of the cat o’nine tails. Yes. Duke The Duke tried hard to convince himself he still possessed those nerves of steel while concurrently being nerveless. Got a problem with that? Didn’t think so. 'I'm sans nervosa,' he told the locals in Estepona, Malaga, where he holidayed four times annually in his three floor, two pool villa with roof terrace. His nervelessness was there for all to see on his CV, his curriculum violencia.

To keep his mind from wallowing in the sorrows of his non-nerve related declining self, Duke The Duke vicariously administered pain to others, chiefly his youngers. He had nothing against Generations X or Y, nor the omnipresent Millennials. It was simply that most of his peers and nearly all of his elders had already been visited by death or were hiding away in care homes, hospices, or ill-gotten Spanish villas awaiting its impending call.

Of all those he wished to visit the most pain upon, above the doctors who accused him of being of a nervous disposition and fellow syndicate bosses who eyed his territory, he looked forward hearing one scream the loudest during torture. One who had done much to scupper his plans to dominate the underworld of southern England. One who had intensified his suffering, hassled his fading mind, ached his cheating heart. Time to wipe this stain from his tablecloth, an ambition he first declared over an otherwise peaceable Easter Sunday dinner with his family almost eight months previously, his shaking hand spilling gravy over the pristine white tablecloth, wide of his turkey, his close family (minus his odious son-in-law) gathered in his ultra-modern six bedroom Kent pad with indoor heated pool.

Eight months on, as the next season to slaughter turkey for tradition approached, Duke The Duke's contacts in the South West reported that the stain was ripe for removal. He sat in his conservatory shaking a little due to the cold, of course, and felt a glimmer of festive tidings warming his insides like sickening mulled wine. He called for Dolores, still glamorous in her mid-middle-age, and asked her to arrange an emergency, extra-ordinary meeting of his least-loved, most available henchmen.

Duke The Duke had given his most reliable, most trusted associates the festive season off, including the mighty Svenlen, as reward for another unerring year of cheating and beating at his behest. Duke The Duke knew he would have to drop down a division or two quality-wise and rely on keenness to impress, hunger to be noticed and pure fear of failure to drive the trio he called in to kill Jake Rodwell.

CHAPTER 4

The village square in Bluff Cove resembled the lounge of a house after an epic and outstandingly violent Christmas party, its blood and body part strewn pavements and cut up fields only partially neatened by the cloak of the still falling snow.

Trudy Rodwell struggled to keep her gloves on. They’d always bothered her, gloves. Made her hands throb as if thumping to escape, urging the lifting of the limitations, suffocating from a lack of ventilation, each finger in a solitary confinement it simply couldn’t hack.

She rushed toward The Smugglers Retreat, the inn that had been the focal point of much of the violence of the previous thirty-six hours, holding her four-year-old daughter Emily’s happily mittened hand—the only part of her daughter that was happy. So this was a grown-up Christmas, the child thought. Cold, snow, work to be done, nowhere warm to shelter, and a divided family. Far from the happy cosy image portrayed in Christmas card fakery.

Emily hadn’t stopped snivelling since her father had hurriedly slammed on the brakes and evacuated their vehicle barely a mile outside the village. She had wanted to get home to the excitement of her bed and the promise of the new on Christmas morning. One more sleep was all there had been between her and simple joy. But she’d been denied that sleep and now... now there was so much that had to happen for good stuff to happen. Her dad had to come back. They had to get home. She had to fall asleep. Santa had to visit.

She had watched her father run crookedly into the snow and screamed his name over and over, expecting him to come back. But she was learning that parents could be as obstinate as their offspring. ‘Why can’t you just do as I ask?’ her father had often implored her. But at four, Emily was too young to understand and, as with many things, resorted to the wail when she didn’t get her way, a wail which reached crescendo after crescendo and continued long after her mother had taken the wheel of the car from her deserter husband and U-turned back toward Bluff Cove.

Trudy made no attempt to follow Rodwell. That stage of their relationship was over. She'd no longer snow blindly follow anyone. Certainly not a husband drunk on whatever it was that was afflicting him today. Now as she drove, she spoke brusquely into her mobile phone. No sign of him... no, he just ran off into a field... How do I know which fucking field? Can you tell the difference? Shit, you just made me swear in front of my daughter. Twice. Place is covered in it... no, I had Emily, I couldn’t leave her in the car to freeze to death or drag her after him through the fucking snow... That’s three times now. I’m heading back to that pub. Meet me there.

She threw the mobile onto the passenger seat and leaned closer to the windscreen to get a better view of the white-out she was driving through, as Emily moaned on the back seat.

Come on, darling. It isn’t all bad. Santa’s still on his way with some great presents for you. Nanny and Grandad said they’d seen him.

CHAPTER 5

Duke The Duke trusted none of the trio he called into separate meetings in the expansive office in the outhouse of his detached house in a gated development with triple garage near Maidstone, Kent. Each was over-eager, listening intently, ignoring his shaking arms as he gesticulated.

If he had trusted any of this trio to deliver the death he desired, he would have given them Christmas off too. If they had a record of harming and hurting that matched Svenlen’s, Duke The Duke need only have called on one to dispatch the target.

His most trusted had sent him postcards, texts and emails from southern Spain, South America, one even from South Africa. All that’s good goes south during the English winter, Duke The Duke thought to himself, including the quality of hitman he could call upon.

Sending three was Dolores’ idea. It'll give you back-up in the event of a fuck-up, she insisted. If one failed to deliver the killer blow, surely one of the remaining duo could, would, had to. He had toyed with sending them in as a unit, but eyeing their profile pictures beamed onto a wall by his Epson Powerlite wireless projector, he got the sense that, as well as his left eyelid flickering, here were three bitter loners, used to flying solo. To expect them to function as a team, that was asking too much.

Bring me the bacon, he had huskily demanded, varying his speech a little across all three briefings, just for variety’s sake. Bring home the prize turkey, basted, pasted, sliced, diced, cooked, de-limbed, beheaded, stuffed, whatever, however. I want his fucking head on a plate, his guts in a cracker, his fingers as the centrepiece candles on my Christmas table.

Yes, the demise of his nemesis would be the best Christmas present the twenty-first century would serve up for Duke The Duke and, more importantly, help him temporarily forget his pain, his shaking excitement at the anticipation, and the fact that another year of his far from exemplary life was almost up.

CHAPTER 6

Who’s answering the questions around here? a hack shouted from amid the throng that had gathered in the recently reopened Bluff Cove village hall, cleansed now of the headless zombified bodies and ponds of blood that had earlier decorated its walls and floors.

Commander Earl Katlee of the United States Army, first responder to the zombie, alien, and chemical crisis that continued to dominate news broadcasts across the world, had detailed two soldiers to create standing space only for the hacks and set a table at the front with the most comfortable seat they could find tucked under it. Another pair of armed US army officers guarded the door, on strict orders to prevent journalists leaving the hall until they got the green light from Katlee who strongly suspected undead were still roaming the fields around the village.

Only local journalists and a few from the English national newspapers had been able to reach Bluff Cove through Christmas Eve’s snowfall. The foreign correspondents were on their way, against the weather’s wishes, facing cancelled flights into London and onto Newquay, blocked roads from Newquay to Bluff Cove and road blocks on the inland and coastal routes into the village. Taxi services all over Devon and Cornwall were straining under the weight of snow.

Katlee knocked sternly on the village hall door and the guards enthusiastically saluted him as he strode past head down and full of his importance, carrying a red paper folder under his arm. He reached the desk, switched on the heater he had requested and swivelled the unit so it pointed in his direction away from the journalists.

A silence descended among the gathered local freelance writers, unused to such a confident stride and so imperious an expression as Katlee wore.

There will be no questions until I have finished reading my statement, opened Katlee coldly. Repeat, no questions until I’ve finished.

None at all? some wag asked.

Katlee clicked his fingers and two soldiers pushed their way through the journalists and grabbed the questioner.

Hold on, I’m from the Truro Times, he shouted, trying to free himself. I’ve every right to be here asking questions. More right than you. This is happening in my back yard.

The soldiers listened but still dragged him out, slamming the door and nodding toward their weapons.

Right, Katlee began, looking down at his now open blood red folder and reading from a sheet within. At 13.57 local time the day before last, the Hubble Space Telescope picked up an unidentified flying object heading toward Earth. This object rapidly disappeared from the radars and was assumed to be space debris. We now know that, in fact, it was an extra-terrestrial space vessel.

There were discernible gasps from the gathered journalists.

This vessel duly crash landed on the beach here in Bluff Cove, southern Cornwall, England. At 19.34 hours last evening, the 23rd of December, reports of further unidentified flying craft were received by the Hubble Space Telescope and relayed to the Operations Team, based Greenbelt. These craft were also headed toward the coast of southern Cornwall. Ballistic Missile Early Warning operatives from RAF Fylindales also picked up the craft and notified central UK government. The US Army division based Northamptonshire was mobilised, and Royal Air Force fighters based Brize Norton scrambled. Upon arrival at Bluff Cove, it was quickly ascertained that the enemy was extra-terrestrial.

Katlee looked up, inadvertently triggering a lightning storm of flash photography.

"In accordance with protocol, the