Five More Days With The Dead (Lanherne Chronicles Book 2) (2 page)

‘Earth to Leon
,’ Patrick said, breaking Leon from his memories.

‘What?
Oh, sorry, Man, I was miles away. What did you say?’ Leon replied, pushing his damp gloves into his pockets.

‘I said we’re almost there and from the looks of it, we’re going to
need your knives,’ said Patrick, nodding to six Dead people lumbering on the lane leading to the gate in the Sub-station fence.

Moving so he could look through the view slit over
Patrick’s shoulder, Leon could see the six animated corpses, each more disgusting and pathetic than the last.

‘
Okay, get a bit closer and I’ll do what I can to even up the odds,’ Leon said, pulling two sharp knives from his vest; flipping one of them over in his hand to reassure himself of its weight and balance.

‘You alright to do this, big man?’ Leon continued, nudging Ryan’s leg with his boot.

‘Just get on with it, hot shot. I thought you wanted to get home,’ Ryan replied, barely giving Leon a glance.

Patrick pulled the mare to a stop and turned to look at the two men behind him. Glancing from one to the other, he tried to gauge if the antagon
ism that had risen between them was going to be a problem. With lives on the line, he had to know his small team would work together effectively. Out here, you needed a friendly pair of eyes watching your back at all times. With one hand already on the bolt of the top hatch, Leon flicked his eyes to Ryan and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Ready?’ Patrick finally said, reaching for his heavy club, still unable to tell what was going on in Ryan’s head.

‘Yep,’ Leon said, and taking a quick deep breath, he threw the top hatch open.

At the sound of the hatch hitting the roof of the cart, one of the Dead slowly turned in their direction. The thing that had once
been a woman in her mid-forties had certainly seen better days. What was left of her hair was matted with filth and plastered to the side of her grey tinged skull. Missing most of the flesh from one of her arms and with a large gaping wound in the side of her mottled face, she turned her hungry gaze upon the figure of Leon now in view. Raising her only working arm in desperate recognition of the living flesh now before her, the Dead woman let forth her low moan through broken and blackened teeth. Her call, filled with so much pitiful need, was cut short as one of Leon’s knives flew fast and true. Hitting his chosen target, Leon’s knife lodged deeply into her forehead. For an instant, she stood frozen in place and then as her brain finally gave in to the nature of a true death, she collapsed to the floor. However, her call to arms had not gone unheeded. One by one, the five remaining Dead turned to face Leon and the cart. The next to fall had once been a teenage boy. With much of the skin stripped from his neck and the lower part of his face, his blackened tongue moved sickeningly behind his torn and ruined mouth. Raising cracked and broken hands beseechingly towards Leon, he took a slow shaky step in his direction. Leon drew back his arm to take aim and once the boy was in his sights, the knife flew soundlessly from his grasp. With a dull ‘thud’, the boy stopped, never reaching the living flesh he so compulsively wanted. As before, Leon’s knife found purchase, lodged deep in the skull just above the boy’s film covered left eye. As a trickle of dark, long dead blood ran from the hilt of the knife, the boy fell to the side, forever still. Two of his Dead companions, unable to recognise the obstacle now lying in their path, stumbled over the body of the boy, falling comically to the road surface. With their withered arms, they struggled to right themselves, never taking their eyes from the sight of Leon.

‘Their arms are moving too much
,’ Leon called to Patrick, ‘I don’t want to risk a knife ending up in an arm when there are easier targets.’

‘
Okay,’ Patrick replied, ‘we’ll get those two later. Can you get the other two?’

‘Sure thing
,’ Leon said under his breath, more to himself than to Patrick, and looked toward the next walking corpse.

This
time, Leon paused briefly, sickened by the abomination he was forced to confront. The creature that Leon thought might have been a man had a sagging mouldy bare chest, its ruined flesh writhing with maggots. Even as it took a shambling step towards the cart, its wriggling offspring dropped from rotten wounds to the floor.

‘Jesus
,’ Leon whispered, as he pulled the third knife free of its sheath.

The
maggot-ridden cadaver was now only a few meters away and even for the Dead, this one was ripe. Even their mare, which was used to the Dead pushing past her to get to the living within the cart, began to snort and swing her head in annoyance at the smell., Covering his mouth and nose with his arm to block out some of the fetid odour, with his eyes beginning to water, Leon threw his knife.

‘Crap
,’ he said, as the knife in flight only sliced off an ear covered in green mould. His aim had been too low and far too much to the right.

‘I’ve got
it, Hot-shot,’ came Ryan’s annoyed voice, loudly kicking open the side hatch.

‘Ryan!’ Patrick shouted, as he scrambled from his front seat after his idiot friend.

Ignoring Patrick, Ryan walked calmly up to the Dead thing to slam the blunt end of his pipe square in its chest. With the sound of decaying bones breaking and rancid flesh tearing, the creature stumbled backwards with something approaching surprise on its face. Then with a sucking sound, Ryan pulled his pipe free of the cadaver’s chest and readied himself for a second blow. With another shower of maggots falling to the floor, the animated corpse, ignoring the now gaping hole in its chest surrounded by shattered bone, lurched forward to grab the living flesh almost within reach. By now, the sixth and final member of this Dead gathering was only a few steps behind the maggot carrier. This final creature must have been verging on seventy when it succumbed to its unnatural existence and as Patrick ran past Ryan to tackle it, he thought it surprising the thing could still manage to stay upright on such skeletal limbs. With his muscular six-foot frame giving power behind his swing, Patrick’s club connected with the side of the Dead man’s head. With a sickening crunch, his decrepit skull not only shattered but also detached from the spinal column with such force that it tore itself free from the body completely. Briefly following the detached head with his eyes as it came to land in a small slushy puddle at the side of the road, Patrick glanced back to see how Ryan was faring. Ryan had taken a step back from the cadaver to give himself more room and then with a hefty kick to the maggot ridden chest, the animated corpse was thrown back onto the cracked road. Quicker than Patrick thought possible, Ryan then stepped forward, swung and buried his pipe deeply into the creature’s forehead. Patrick glared at Ryan, feeling the anger building within him.

‘You fucking
...’ Patrick began, his anger boiling over.

‘Heads up guys!’
Leon’s urgent call came from above, interrupting him.

The two moving cadavers that had fallen finally righted themselves and
they were slowly dragging broken limbs and torn dead flesh towards where Ryan and Patrick stood. As the two men turned, they saw another of Leon’s knives fly through the air and lodge in a Dead woman’s decaying skull. Falling to the road in a crumpled mess of soiled rags and limbs, one final almost relief filled moan escaped her Dead lips, before becoming still forever.

‘You, stay here
,’ Patrick said through clenched teeth, as he prodded Ryan in the chest with his club.

Walking over to the remaining Dead man, Patrick realised the time for diplomacy with Ryan was over. Thanks to his
actions, he had been left with no choice, He would have to have it out with him. Realising his mind wasn’t focusing on the task at hand, Patrick turned back to the Dead man shambling towards him. Excited by the proximity of Patrick’s living flesh, the Dead man reached slowly for him. Compared to his travelling companions, this corpse was in good shape and from the look of him, could not have been one of the Dead for more than a few weeks. Yes, a chunk of flesh might have been torn from his cheek and both his lips ripped away to reveal the yellowing bone beneath, but compared to the others, he looked positively healthy. Patrick looked at the Dead man in front of him. It took him a moment to realise what was wrong with the figure he saw. Both of the man’s hands were missing. From the look of the stumps, they didn’t appear to have been eaten away but more like removed by some sort of blade, not that his lack of hands made him any less dangerous. Wanting to get it over and done with, Patrick delivered a quick hard kick to the Dead man’s kneecap, snapping the leg sideways. With his club raised high, standing over the now prone corpse, Patrick took a deep breath. Letting the club fall with as much power as he could muster, Patrick aimed for the spot just above the bridge of the eyebrow bone. Oblivious to the club that would finally put an end to it un-natural existence, the Dead man’s stumps pawed impotently at Patrick’s trouser leg, desperate to get to the covered flesh. With the sound of a wet crack, they soon fell lifeless, no longer controlled by a brain that didn’t know its body should be still. Wiping the worst of the gore of off his club on a part of the Dead man’s jacket, Patrick tentatively lifted the now lifeless stump to take a closer look. Yes, they had definitely been amputated rather than eaten, he decided. What worried him though was the thin wire wrapped tightly around each wrist, so tight that it dug into the flesh.

‘
This has been used as a type of tourniquet
,’ he thought to himself. ‘
These hands were removed while he was still alive and someone had wanted him to stay that way, for a while at least
.’

Storing the information to think about later, Patrick knew
that first, he had to deal with more pressing matters; namely Ryan. As he walked back to cart, he watched Ryan cleaning bits of bone and flesh from his trusty length of pipe.

‘So, what the
fuck was that all about Ryan?’ He asked, trying to keep his anger in check.

‘What?’ Ryan replied, a bored tone creeping into his voice
. ‘Knife boy here, missed, so I dealt with it, no...’

‘Dealt with it
,’ Patrick interrupted. ‘You put us all in danger. You know the rule. We never leave the cart until we outnumber the Dead!’

‘But
…’ Ryan tried to continue.

‘No
fucking buts, you screwed up, Ryan. You screwed up. Oh, just get in the cart, Ryan,’ Patrick said, his anger evaporating leaving a tired sadness. The others had been right all along. Ryan was becoming a liability.

Travelling in silence along the cracked and overgrown lane, the fence that promised relief from the Dead soon came into view. They had survived another trip
amongst the death and decay to return to the people they loved and cared for. They had returned to the one place left to them they could call home.

‘
Well, at least there are no Dead at the gate,’ Leon observed absentmindedly as he peered through the front view slit over Patrick’s shoulder.

‘Do we need to raise the flag or can you see anyone in the open?’ he continued.

Should everyone be up on the pylon when a foraging party returned home, Duncan had constructed a hand-operated winch situated on the outside of the fence that would raise a flag within the grounds to alert those within of their presence.

Pulling S
hadow to a halt, Patrick leant forward to get a better look.

‘Erm… yes, there’s Gabe over by the stable,’ he said
. ‘Give him a shout will you.’

Flipping open the top hatch, Leon stood and with his loud high whistle breaking the
silence, he managed to get Gabe to look in their direction. Recognising Shadow and the cart she pulled, Gabe waved enthusiastically at the returning group.

‘They’re back! Patrick and the others are back!’ he cried to the unseen people on the pylon above him, before jogging to one of the small concrete block buildings to retrieve the padlock key.

‘They’re back, Sarah,’ he said with a beaming smile, running past the older woman as she came out of the livestock building, a basket of fresh eggs under her arm.

‘I
heard you, Gabe. I heard you,’ she smiled, as she watched the eager teenager disappear inside the next building.

Gabe was a bit of a mystery to th
e rest of the survivors at the Substation. He was found wandering their fields eight months ago, alone and half starved. Unsure of even his real age, Gabe had been unable to tell them much of his past. He had probably only been six or seven when the Dead came to claim the earth as their own. His young mind, unable to process the many horrors he was unable to escape, had blocked out whole years of running and hiding. He sometimes had vague snapshot images of his parents that would rise through the fog of his memory but he knew at some point during those missing years, his parents had been taken from him by bloody hands and gnashing teeth. He remembered the lid of a large blanket box closing down on him, and his mother’s concerned face slowly disappearing from sight, as her hand slipped through to touch his cheek one more time. Then as he lay there curled in the darkness, he heard the screams. How he then escaped the Dead that surely had torn into his parents, he had no idea. He also had brief memories of creeping through the darkness foraging for food and even seeing other survivors from time to time. Wary of approaching the strangers, he kept to himself.