Mark Morris - Zombie Apocalypse! Horror Hospital

[dem bones]

Mark Morris - Zombie Apocalypse! Horror Hospital [created by Stephen Jones] (Robinson, 2014)

Joe Roberts

Blurb:
Inside this hospital . . . the prognosis is terminal. For Staff Nurse Cat Harris, the night shift at her hospital in south London starts off like any other . . . But she isn't expecting the four girls who were attacked by a crazed stranger in a nightclub . . . the trio of local gang members involved in a shooting incident . . . or the spread of an unknown virus that starts bringing the recently dead back to a horrible semblance of life. Soon, heavily armed troops have the hospital in lockdown, and as the disease spreads rapidly through staff, patients and members of the public, a small group of survivors battle to stay alive against an ever-increasing army of the flesh-eating 'infected'. Set during the dawning hours of the Zombie Apocalypse, this gripping and gory novel reveals more about the reanimation virus as it expands out from All Hallows Church, the secret of the swarms of insects, what horrors haunt the Medical Museum and how, behind it all, emerges the sinister figure of Thomas Moreby himself . . .

This has the makings of a first class modern horror pulp romp, pacey, vignette-driven, brutal, funny and rich in shocks and scares. Horror Hospital refers back to documents leaked by John Llewellyn Probert and Paul Finch in previous Zombie Apocalypse anthologies, specifically those detailing the experiences of police and medical staff on the terrible May Day Eve when South East London came under attack from the plague of flesh eating dead.

It's Christine McGough's hen night and Lisa is already questioning the choice of venue and the evening's dress code. Elevation in Catford is a hang-out for charmless, pissed-up macho meatheads on the pull, and the 'sexy nurses' costumes are asking for trouble. Things turn from bad to worse with the arrival of a skinny, long haired, foul smelling tramp , who informs the bride-to-be that "Anarchon, the master of fleas is upon us. All will succumb to his judgement." Chris, drunk out of her brains, makes a nasty comment. Tramp takes a bite out of her arm. The crowd kick him to a pulp.

Even before she arrives at the Hospital for the late shift, nurse Cat Harris's night is off to a bad start. A crazy woman steps into the road deliberately launches herself at the car. The kamikaze pedestrian's face is smeared with blood and - is that fur? Picking herself up, the woman throws herself on the bonnet, clearly intent at doing Cat damage.

"NHS funding had always been tight, but this current Government didn't even pretend to give a shit about the health of the nation."

Meanwhile in gangland, the Greenwich boys have fire-bombed the party attended by the top brass of their despised rivals, the Deptford Road Crew. Even under ordinary circumstances, the underfunded A & E department of Lewisham & Greenwich University Hospital would be stretched, but when the emergency cases have a tendency toward rabid attacks on all and sundry, this shift will be anything but "ordinary."

By rights, this genre should be as terminally over as vampires but there's life in the walking dead yet!

[dem bones]

Photo: Smith & Jones

Some life-lessons learned from reading Horror Hospital:

• Sexy nurses costumes fast lose their allure when worn by an eviscerated walking corpse.
• Never wear a Ramones t-shirt to A&E.
• The dead are capable of driving an ambulance and engaging in off-colour banter within an hour of their death and resurrection.
• Never trust a nine-year old cancer patient in Sponge Bob Square Pants pyjamas.
• We allow New World Pharmaceuticals a foothold in the NHS at our peril.

What covet experiments has Professor Déesharné been conducting on behalf of his New World Pharmaceuticals paymasters?

"Fucking zombie apocalypse, innit?" observes Carlton, leader of the Greenwich Crew, an old head on seventeen year old shoulders even before the horrors of tonight. It was Cat treated his stab wound at the beginning of her shift, and circumstances have made the pair inseparable if they're planning on staying alive as opposed to dead-alive.

When Diane and Vince the ambulance driver split, she got custody of their little boy, Luke. Vince loves his son, and he'll not let anything so trivial as a zombie apocalypse stand in the way of keeping their date.

Gill Eaves probes the darkness of the medical museum, seeking the mobile she lost during a romp with that devil in a lab coat, Dr. Tim Marshall. The specimen jars spill their loathsome and freakish contents, but worse even than the animated two-headed infant and multi-fingered severed hand are the swarm of red fleas gathering before her face. There are equal terrors awaiting Carlton and Cat in both the Maternity unit and children's ward.

Meanwhile, the SS02 storm-troopers seal off the hospital and set to terrorising staff and patients alike with their own brutal brand of law enforcement - an untimely nosebleed could cost you dear in these appalling circumstances. Those of us who've survived Zombie Apocalypse! and its sequel, Fightback, are all too uncomfortably aware that, far from being confined to the Hospital, the outbreak has already claimed much of South London long before Dean & Al, aka 'Anarchy TV In The UK,' upload their All Hallowes Church riot footage to YouTube.

Who - if any? - will survive to see the commute to work? That would be telling, but I reckon you'll have a good, scary time finding out.

File under: Shaun Of The Dead@Holby City