Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead (21 page)

The twisting road had led them through a shallow winding valley, its rolling sides a patchwork of lush overgrown meadows, gone to seed farmland and light woodland. Nestled at its heart and hugging the banks of a briskly running stream, they found a small village. Little more than a collection of two dozen homes clustering around a church and a few essential shops, it bore the sorry signs that even here the Dead had continued their ceaseless hunt for the living and more importantly found them. Smashed windows, broken down doors; all were clear testaments to the unholy compulsion the Dead had to feed. Charlie had hoped that this close to a settlement of survivors they would have at least found the village cleared of the Dead but as Star pulled them through the debris strewn streets he was disappointed to find that not only were many of the original villagers still present, albeit in a Dead state, but there appeared to be quite a few more recent, less decayed additions to their number too. The only consolation Charlie could take from the depressing sights around them was the single sign post telling them that Saint Xavier’s Academy was but a mile ahead of them; their journey was hopefully almost at an end. This news couldn’t come soon enough for Carmella for it was clear to them all now that she was indeed in the early stages of labour. So when the road leading from the village began to follow the high boundary wall of Saint Xavier’s they all breathed a sigh of relief, Carmella would not have to give birth on the road after all.

‘Now we just have to hope they’re open to receiving guests,’ muttered Michael, as the cart rolled past the savaged remains of a Dead girl pulling herself along the side the road by her claw like hands. ‘They certainly could do with a hand clearing up around here.’

‘They must feel pretty secure behind that wall?’ whispered Liz, unable to really comprehend why anyone would allow so many the Dead to exist right on their doorstep.

‘Maybe they’re not good fighters,’ added Charlie in a hushed voice as he glanced at the figure of a Dead man knocked aside by the passing of the cart, ‘or perhaps maybe they’re just too low on numbers to tackle them,’

‘That would certainly explain those fresher looking corpses back at the village,’ nodded Cam, ‘and I know it’s shitty to say it but if they’ve lost some of their community already and are having trouble keeping the Dead in check… well… they’ll be more likely to want our help, surely?’

‘It certainly could work in our favour, that’s for sure,’ Charlie replied, easing Star around the branch of a fallen tree partly blocking the road. ‘But we’ll just have to see which way the wind’s blowing when we meet them… assuming we ever find the bloody gate to get in, that is…’

‘Perhaps it’s just...’ began Liz, but her words were cut short as Carmella took a sudden sharp intake of breath.

‘Carmella?’ whispered Fran, urgently taking the woman’s hand to comfort her as she shared a worried glance with Liz.

‘It is getting worse,’ she replied, squeezing Fran’s fingers tightly. ‘I think the baby, it must be coming soon.’

‘We’re almost there, Carmella. We’re almost there…’ soothed Fran, gently brushing aside some of the woman’s thick curls. ‘It won’t be long now, I’m sure…’

‘Caro Dio, aiutami. Salva il mio bambino. Salva il mio bambino...’ said Carmella, her whispered prayer repeated over and over as the wave of sharp spasming pain wracked through her.

‘Hush, Carmella… calm down, calm down… Try to breathe through the pain,’ Fran continued, trying to assure the young woman who was clearly on the verge of panic. ‘Your waters haven’t even broken yet, it’ll still be a while before the actual contractions start… we’ll be inside the walls by then…’

‘But I am feeling pain now,’ she interrupted, tears in her eyes as she looked nervously from one concerned face to the next. ‘Why is there pain now?’

Liz and Fran caught each other’s worried glances. With no true medical knowledge between them neither of them could fathom why Carmella should be feeling like this even before the contractions had started but from the silent look they shared they both knew the birth of  Carmella’s baby was not about to be an easy thing.

‘I… I don’t know, Carmella…’ Fran whispered, wiping away a tear as it rolled down the pregnant woman’s cheek. ‘But everything will be alright, you’ll see, everything will be fine.’

‘There’s a crossroads coming up,’ said Charlie, glancing behind him to those in the cart, ‘hopefully we’ll be able to see the gate from there…’

‘Let’s fucking hope…’ began Michael.

‘Hang on, can you hear something?’ interrupted Liz, holding up her hand for silence.

Instantly each pair of ears in the cart strained to detect just what had caught Liz’s attention. Apart from Carmella’s tearful panting, all that reached them was the intermittent singing of birds in the trees outside and the usual rhythmic sounds that Star and the creaking cart made as they moved.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ whispered Michael, shaking his head as he looked at Liz.

‘No wait!’ Liz said, urgently putting her finger to her lips. ‘There! There it is again!’

‘Yes… Yes, I heard it that time,’ Cam and Charlie almost said in unison.

‘Sounded like someone yelling or something,’ continued Cam, nodding his head.

‘And more than one person… I think,’ Charlie added.

As the cart drew closer to the corner the mysterious yelling became more and more coherent. Not only could they now hear that is was indeed more than one male voice calling out but through odd cheers and jeering there were also yelps, squeals, grunting and most worrying all, the moaning of the Dead.

‘I…I don’t like this,’ said Liz to Charlie, placing a hand protectively on Anne’s shoulder.

‘Me neither,’ muttered Charlie to himself as Star finally began to take the right hand turn.

Almost immediately Charlie pulled back on Star’s reins, bringing her and the cart to a halt.

‘What the fuck?’ he said under his breath, unable to understand just what he was seeing.

There, approximately thirty meters ahead of him in front of a set of wide iron gates, Charlie could see two young men fighting for their lives against six of the Dead. Beside them, lying in a pool of his freshly spilt blood, a third had lost his own personal battle to stay alive and was currently having strips of flesh torn from his shaking body by a further two decaying ghouls. This in itself was horrific enough but while the two remaining men struggled to keep the Dead at bay the wall behind them was lined with more than a dozen young men seemingly happy to watch the scene playing out below them. Obviously standing on some sort of elevated platform many of the crowd simply watched the carnage with blank faces, their eyes following each twist and duck of the fighting men as they dodged the outstretched arms reaching for them. But not all viewed the bloody battle with such detached observation and some actually laughed and jeered at the two men’s fight to survive, whooping with glee with each blow struck or snapping jaw barely avoided.

‘Why aren’t they helping?’ muttered Charlie, noticing the laughing young men on the wall were considerably better armed than those fighting the Dead, who only had knives hardly adequate for the task at hand.

Even as he spoke Charlie saw one of those fighting, an unusually short man with a shaggy mop of blond hair, slip on his comrades blood as he tried to dodge the grasping arms of a Dead woman and fall to his knees. Before he could push himself up the woman was on him, eagerly joined seconds later by a corpse of a Dead man with much of the flesh stripped from his face. Kicking out wildly to keep the man with the ravaged face at bay the blond man struggled with the wriggling Dead woman as she snapped and clawed to get to his flesh.  

‘We need to do something!’ said Liz, watching the scene unfold over Charlie’s shoulder.

Tearing his eyes momentarily from the man fighting for his life, Charlie knew even if he managed to put down both of his attackers the blond man on the ground and his fighting partner would soon have a more immediate and urgent problem to deal with. For the man who had already provided a feast of his flesh for the Dead was beginning to claw his way back from death’s abyss and unlike their current foes he would be fast and vicious.

‘Charlie!’ Liz cried, breaking him from the thoughts playing out in his head.

‘Michael, get Tom!’ Charlie snapped, spinning in his seat to reach for the side hatch. ‘Cam, with me! Liz, stay here and get ready to move the cart out of here if anything goes wrong!’

‘But…’ she began to protest, knowing she was a far better skilled fighter than either Cam or Michael.

‘Just do as I say!’ he replied, kicking open the hatch as Michael did the same with the door set in the rear wall of the cart, a length of pipe in his hand.

Michael’s feet had barely touched to road surface before Tom and Phil came charging toward him.

‘Charlie wants…’ Michael began, as Phil thundered past him roaring like a warrior of old as he waved a heavily spiked club about his head.

‘On it!’ called Tom, a footstep behind Phil and deftly drawing his own sickles from his back as he ran.

Turning to make sure Fran had closed the rear hatch behind him, Michael span and followed the two men from the rear cart into battle.

‘Get the one coming back!’ shouted Charlie, knowing Tom could easily dispatch the corpse before it fully reanimated while he attempted to rescue the struggling man on the ground.

Darting forward, Charlie kicked out at the faceless Dead man knocking him to the ground and then swiftly turned to grab the Dead woman. With only seconds before her snapping jaws bit into the blond man’s cheek, Charlie grabbed a fistful of her lank stinking hair and yanked her head sharply backwards. With a ripping sound her scalp tore, exposing the yellowing bone of her cranium beneath but it had given the young man the precious second needed to save his life. Pulling his arm from under her writhing corpse he stabbed at her face again and again, screaming with rage, until purely by chance his knife plunged through one of her milky film covered eyes to the rotting brain within. Almost instantly her corpse became still and with a ragged panting breath the young man pushed her now lifeless body away from him.

For a brief second Charlie and the blond man locked eyes, and what Charlie saw made him balk. For it was not the face of a young man looking back at him but that of a terrified teenage girl.

‘Get up!’ he shouted, turning to deal with the faceless Dead man who was even now pushing himself up from his knees.

Using the serrated knife attached to his wrist, Charlie yelled as he stabbed down through the top of the Dead man’s skull, making sure he would never rise from his knees again. With a brief glance to make sure the girl had pulled herself up from the ground, Charlie turned his attention to the next approaching cadaver. Arming himself with one of the ice picks slotted on his chest, he stepped forward to meet the rotting corpse in front of him; its blood-caked fingers already reaching for him. With more of the Dead still to deal with, Charlie knew he had to make swift work of consigning this one to the same fate as his faceless brethren. So with a back handed swipe, he plunged the business end of the ice pick deep into the side of the hungry cadaver’s temple. With a ‘thud’ the pick shattered the Dead man’s skull, tearing into his brain and stilling him permanently.

Behind him the newly awakened Dead man had barely had time to open his film covered eyes before Tom’s sickles, ever eager to be bathed once again in the blood of the un-living, had removed his head from his shoulders. Briefly following the head as it tumbled away from the body, Charlie quickly turned his attention back to the battle at hand. Thanks to Phil joining Michael and Cam in the bloody encounter, there only remained one further Dead woman to be dealt with. But before he had taken a step in her direction Tom’s blades were flashing through the air once again as he sprinted over to engaged her. Within seconds the Dead woman’s un-natural existence was finally at an end, with nothing remaining of her but a collection of putrid severed limbs.

‘Everyone OK?’ panted Tom, looking from his friends and the two strangers they had saved.

It was only once Tom had spoken that Charlie noticed the crowd on the wall had fallen silent. Turning to look up at those watching from the wall, he was met with a row of faces, each silently looking down at him. Some had relief in their eyes, some had detached boredom, while a few others had something that Charlie could only describe as annoyance or disappointment. One thing that surprised him though was that of all those gathered above him only one seemed to be over the age of twenty.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ he called up to those on the wall that, now realising the group also contained a few young women.

When no one replied, he looked from face to face trying to gauge just who looked as though they led this group of survivors. Automatically his eyes went to the late middle aged man standing to his far right, but as their eyes locked and he looked shamefully away, Charlie knew he was very much mistaken. Whoever this man was, he was broken and it was clear to Charlie this man held onto both his life and sanity by the thinnest of threads. He was certainly no leader.

‘I said who’s in charge here?’ Charlie repeated, flicking some gore from his wrist knife, while Tom and the others slowly walked over to show a united front.

When again he was met with only silence, Charlie stepped over to the tom-boyish girl he had saved.

‘Who’s…’ he began to say when he was interrupted.