Last Days With the Dead (23 page)

‘Bit harsh, Pelling
,’ said Glass, standing up from where he had been crouching by the man’s body.

‘So sue me,’ she replied, callously dropping the pillow back over the girl’s body.

‘You’re all heart,’ Glass continued, his hand resting on the door handle of what looked like a built in cupboard.

‘Kiss my arse!’ Pelling replied, pushing aside the curtain hanging over a small window.

As Andrews looked away from the bodies of the mother and daughter and back to the father, it was almost as if in slow motion that he saw Glass’ hand twist the doorknob to open the cupboard door. In a flash, he realised they still hadn’t found the young boy.

‘Glass!’ he shouted, raising his assault rifle a fraction of a second too late.

At the sound of his name, Glass turned back to Andrews, confusion written on his face, but by now, his fate was already sealed. In the time it took him to look over at Andrews, a small emaciated figure dressed only in filth covered pyjamas, stepped from the shadows of the cupboard to clamp its teeth on the fleshy part of his hand.

‘Christ!’ Glass shouted in panic, lifting the small boy off the floor as he tried to yank his hand away from the searing pain
. ‘Get him off me!’

As the boys teeth finally came together with a snap, he dropped to the carpet and began to chew on his tasty bloody morsel.

‘Fucking Cunt!’ Glass shouted, kicking the boy in head with such force that the skin of his decayed neck simply tore under the pressure, leaving his head hanging at an odd angle.

‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ Private Glass continued to shout, stamping down again and again on the boy’s head until nothing but a putrid bloody mess remained
. The boy lay motionless, never to move again.

When he finally stopped, only the sounds of his panting breath and the drip, drip
, of his own blood falling to the carpet could be heard in the room.

Glass could hardly tear his eyes away from the ruined body of the small boy that had effectively ended his life.

‘Glass,’ Andrews began, fighting to find the right words, but knowing whatever he said would be worthless to Glass, ‘I’m… I’m so sorry, man…’

‘What?’ Glass replied, finally looking from Andrews to Pelling
. ‘It’s okay, the Doc can patch me up, he’s working on a vaccine isn’t he, he can patch me up, I’ll be fine…’

‘Glass…’ Andrews continued, with a sigh.

‘No, Fuck you, Andrews!’ Glass shouted, holding his bleeding hand to his chest. ‘Get the Doc, he’ll tell you, get the fucking Doc! Get the Fucking…’

But his words suddenly ended, as a single shot showered the wall behind him with a bloody splatter of skull fragments and brain matter.

‘What the Fuck!’ Andrews shouted, turning on Pelling.

‘He was dead already,’ she calmly said, lowering her rifle, ‘we both know it
, he was just dragging it out.’

‘That wasn’t your call to make, Pelling!’ Andrews spat, his disgust for the woman dripping from his words
. ‘He had the right to make his peace, it was all he had left and you took it from him.’

Pelling looked back at Andrews, a blank expression on her face.

‘Fuck!’ Andrews said to himself, knowing his words would never be able to alter what the woman had done.

‘You’re a cold hearted bitch,’ he finally said, shaking his head as he turned to leave
. ‘I just hope someone offers you more compassion than you gave Glass when your time comes.’

Pelling watched Andrews storm from the room and disappear down the small staircase. Once he was gone from sight, her gaze fell on the still body of the man she had just killed.

‘I wouldn’t make such a stupid mistake,’ she said.

***

‘Well, what about taking this road then?’ said Steve, pointing to a spot on the map. ‘We can follow it along here, to there, and then, then it’s just this road all the way to Carlyon bay.’

‘But that’s the main road into Carlyon,’ Patrick replied, his thumb stroking his scar while he  studied the map, ‘not only will there be more chance that we’ll run into gridlocked traffic
, but I’m guessing if it is passable, this Sergeant Ridge and his convoy originally came that way, so we’ll also encounter a lot more of the Dead too.’

When Liz had turned up with a face from Steve’s past
, it had been a reunion full of mixed emotions for him. As elated to see Karen as Steve was, his joy was tainted by the news that his friend, her brother, had died. For Karen, seeing a friendly face again after the terrors she had endured since waking up next to her brother’s corpse, had opened a window to her grief and as she climbed up into the cart, she fell weeping into Steve’s arms. With her face pressed against his chest to muffle her sobs, she had finally allowed herself to mourn for Matt.

‘I see motherhood hasn’t stopped you
from acting like a lunatic?’ Imran had said to Liz, holding her tight in his arms, as he kissed the top of her head.

‘What choice did I have?’ she had replied, looking up into his dark loving eyes
. ‘When Karen said you were going the wrong way, I knew I had to come, we have to get Charlie back, we have to.’

‘But why did you bring Karen with you?’ asked Steve, looking over to Liz.

‘No, no, she was right,’ said Karen, finally pushing herself away from Steve’s chest to wipe away her tears. ‘I could’ve been anyone, she was just keeping the others at the convent safe, and anyway, I made a promise to myself that I would do all I could to help get the baby back to his mother, for Matt’s sake.’

‘Thank you
,’ said Liz quietly, reaching across to take Karen’s hand, ‘and for the record, I’m glad you are who you say you are, and you’re right, we might need all the help we can get.’

Karen gave Liz a shaky smile and after giving her fingers a light squeeze in return, seemed visibly
to put aside her grief again. Her pain could be dealt with at a later date, now there was a job to do. A job Matt had died for.

‘Right,’ said Karen, pushing a lock of her hair that had come loose from her pl
ait behind her ear, ‘so what’s the plan then?’

After much discussion, they had decided to cover as much ground as they could before they lost the light. Travelling at night was dangerous enough when they were familiar with the roads, out here, in unknown territory, it would be suicidal to carry on in the dark. They would just have to assume the Sergeant and his convoy were making bad time too. If they could somehow get to the bay before them
, or prevent them from boarding their transport, at least then they would have a chance. If not, with none of them with any real sailing experience, it didn’t look promising.

‘Move out of the light for a second will you, Phil
,’ said Liz, nudging the big man with her elbow, ‘I want to check something out.’

‘You’re the second person today that’s called me fat,’ Phil grumbled, twisting his body so he wasn’t blocking any of the light spilling in through the spy holes.

Rolling her eyes, Liz lifted a section of the map up to catch the light.

‘Yes,’ she said, her finger quickly tracing a line across the map.

‘What?’ asked Imran and Patrick together.

‘The train lines,’ she said looking from Patrick to Imran excitedly, ‘we can use the train line
, it goes all the way to Carlyon bay station.’

‘And who said motherhood made your brains go soft?’ said Phil, jokingly pinching Liz’s cheek.

The idea to use the train lines to bypass the forever twisting lanes that criss-crossed Cornish countryside, had not originally been one of their own but that of the insane leader of a religious cult they had encountered  over a year ago. The cult had used it as a means of taking stolen children back to their compound swiftly, without encountering the Dead unnecessarily, but what had once been used to take a child away, now offered the chance to bring one home.

‘So how do we get on the line?’ asked Karen
. ‘Surely it’s fenced off somehow?’

‘Not at rail crossings,’ Imran mumbled, pushing his face close to Liz’s so they could both scan the map for a likely spot, ‘the rails dip down level with the road. All we have to do is find one
, preferably with the gate up or still able to move.’

‘There!’ said Liz, jabbing a finger at a point on the map and quickly tilting it toward Patrick who sat in the driving seat
. ‘Patrick, do you think we could get here by nightfall?’

Patrick placed his finger in the same position and took the map from Liz to examine the new route they would need to take.

‘Hmm, probably,’ he said biting his lip as he concentrated on the map, ‘but we’d be cutting it fine, and we’ll have to find somewhere safe to sleep before the sun goes down. We’re not risking entering an unknown building in the dark, either we check it out when there’s still light, or we sleep sitting up. I don’t want anyone bitching about sore necks tomorrow if we do.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said Steve, jokingly
, ‘we promise.’

‘Sorry
,’ Patrick replied, realising from the expressions of his younger companions just what tone had crept into his voice, ‘sometimes the P.E. teacher in me likes to remind me he’s still there.’

‘And what did you do before
, before, you know,’ Karen began to ask Phil after Patrick had set Delilah moving again.

‘Before the Dead came and ripped everything and everyone I ever knew to pieces?’ Phil asked, slowly crossing his thick arms.

It was odd to find someone who had been so cloistered from the everyday life with the Dead that they were unaware of the general faux pas of asking about people’s lives before the Dead came. When a person’s past was likely filled with horrific memories, you didn’t go prodding for details.

‘Butcher,’ Phil finally said with a small smile, not wanting to make Karen feel bad for showing an interest, ‘I was a butcher
, and unfortunately with all this meat walking around, the butcher in me is still there, alive and kicking.’    

It took them well into the afternoon to reach the level crossing Liz had located on the map
. Above them, the sky that that morning had been such a clear blue, a promise of the freshness of the spring day to come, had started to darken with angry grey clouds over to the east.

‘I don’t like the look of those clouds,’ Patrick mumbled, peering up at the sky through his viewing slit, ‘
perhaps we should find somewhere for the night now, before we get up onto the train line?’

‘And who knows when we’ll be able to find another level crossing where we can get back on the road,’ he continued, turning to look back at the squashed travelling companions in the cart
. ‘Then we could be travelling half the night, I really don’t want Samson or Delilah to get a soaking if they don’t have to.’

‘Agreed,’ said Liz, nodding, ‘but where?’

Both of the horses at some point in the past had been the only thing standing between her and a horrendous death, and she cared for them both too much to risk them getting needlessly sick.

‘Have you room to turn round?’ asked Steve, leaning forward to look over Patrick’s shoulder.

‘Err, yes… just about,’ Patrick replied, judging how wide the road they were presently on was, ‘why?’

‘About ten minutes ago
, we passed a turning that had an old sign, it said something about a nursery,’ said Steve, moving aside his rifle as he sat back down. ‘They must have had some sort of secure building if they sold to the public, even if it was just a port-a-cabin, it should be okay for one night.’

So after a brief pause to turn Delilah and the cart round, they found themselves back tracking to the turning where Steve had seen the sign. What they found when they finally pulled through the gate of ‘Crampion Nursery and Garden
Centre’, was far more than they had hoped or expected.

The Nursery was a series of three large greenhouses, now little more than metal frames holding onto the last remnants of shattered panes of glass, which all butted onto a sound but dilapidated looking main building. The contents of the greenhouses, left untended by Man and open to the elements, had grown into a riot of huge shrubs and plants. Greenery now completely covered every spot within the metal frames, while ivy, wisteria
, and unidentifiable creepers raced with each other to rise up and along the metal supports. On the centre of the main building’s slate tiled roof, stood an elaborate leaded pyramid shaped skylight. At some point, it had also fallen victim to the flying debris that had wreaked such destruction on the greenhouses next to it, for two sides of the pyramid were now devoid of their glass completely, the torn strips of lead hanging impotently in twisted shapes.

‘Well, the perimeter fence should have kept most of the Dead out,’ Patrick said, flicking the reins to urge Delilah up to a weed infested cobbled entranceway, ‘and no cars or wrecks in the car park either
, could be a good sign.’

‘Now we just have to get the door
open,’ said Phil, reaching for two of the crowbars. ‘Steve, fancy giving me a hand? Imran, cover us.’

‘No problem,’ Imran replied, hoisting himself up and pushing open the top hatch to scout for any unwelcome corpses with eating bloody flesh on their minds, ‘Clear
.’