Last Days With the Dead (26 page)

With one last deep thrust
, the soldier climaxed, his body shuddering as the pleasure overwhelmed him. Then, just when Andrews thought what he was witnessing couldn’t possibly get any worse, the solider reached down and grabbed a handful of something from within Pelling. With a forceful yank, he pulled a wet and fleshy mass from her body, and then, as if it held the most exquisite perfume, he caressed it with his face, rubbing the bloody wetness across his cheeks and lips. Then with almost a tenderness, the man kissed the lump of meat and sighed.

‘You’re fucking insane, Soldier!’ Andrews snapped through his gritted teeth, swiftly swinging his assault rifle from his back and into firing position.

With a second sigh, this one born more of irritation rather than ecstasy, the man’s arm fell to his side, allowing the lump of flesh to fall with a thud to the floor.

‘You always were a kill joy, Andrews,’ replied the man in a familiar voice.

‘No… no… no…’ Andrews whispered, shaking his head in disbelief, as the man began to turn his head to look at him.

‘The bitch fucked me up,’ said Glass, grinning a blood covered smile, as a dribble of dark blood slowly ran down his nose from the hole in his forehead
. ‘Seemed only fair to repay the favour.’

Andrews shook his head in disbelief, he knew Glass was dead, this couldn’t be happening.

‘You can have a go if you like,’ said Glass, licking clotted blood from his fingers, before reaching down to pull up his trousers, ‘there’s enough for two, I don’t mind.’

Andrews, frozen by the horror and impossibility of what he was seeing, was unable to move. His limbs simply refused to obey the commands he silently screamed at them from his mind
, and even as Glass thrust his hand deep inside Pelling’s savaged corpse again and started to walk towards him, Andrews was still unable to move.

‘There’s enough for two
.’ Glass repeated softly, his hand rising up to cup Andrews’ face.

‘No
,’ said Andrews, the word barely a breath.

‘But she tastes so good
,’ said Glass, his bloody fingers slowly slipping across Private Andrew’s cheek towards his mouth, ‘taste.’

As the gore covered fingers slipped deep into his mouth, Andrews finally found his voice.

‘No!’ he screamed, sitting bolt upright in his seat of the carrier, his heart hammering in his chest.

‘Jesus!’ said Mallon
. ‘You sacred the fucking crap out of me.’

‘Sorry
,’ said Andrews, rubbing his face vigorously as if to erase the images his mind had conjured up, ‘bad dream.’

‘Keep it together, Soldier,’ snapped Sergeant Ridge, a mix of anger and mistrust on his face.

‘Sir,’ replied Andrews, anxious to keep under the Sergeant’s radar.

Looking around the inside of the
carrier, he saw the same sideways glances, barely hiding their apprehension, coming from Pelling, Mallon, and Dr Lambert. Living on the base where personnel, unable to cope with the stresses and mental fatigue of the Death-walker plague effectively ending the world as they knew it, had resorted to suicide, they knew a soldier on the edge was not only a danger to themselves, but could put them all in peril. It was only Mary Donaldson and her daughter who, somewhat uninterestedly, returned his gaze. They had lived with the horrors of the Dead for the last eight years; possibly, they saw these tortured images that visited them as they slept as just an inevitability. The human mind simply could not witness the terrors of this new world without some form of release, and they accepted that.

After clearing a small number of the walking corpses that had collected at the farm gates, drawn from the surrounding fields by the sounds of life and the prospect of something bloody to feast upon, they had finally left the farmhouse for the ghosts of the family that once lived there
, and their new unfortunate guest, Private Glass. The morning had passed quite uneventfully and with the spring sun warming up the windowless carrier, Andrews had been lulled into his uneasy sleep by its constant rocking. But with the last nightmare images of Glass thankfully fading, Private Andrews was most definitely awake now.

He idly watched Dr Lambert meticulously checking and
double-checking the data he was collecting from the poor sedated infant that they had stolen away from the convent. With almost an indifferent attitude to the child, the Doctor opened the side of the clear container, grabbed hold of one of his small arms, wiped it with an alcohol swab, and inserted a needle deep into the flesh. Just looking at the process, Andrews could tell the Doctor’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired. He clearly saw the infant not as the vulnerable child that he was, but simply as a thing. A thing that he needed to study, to understand, to unwrap the secrets he held within him, and as such, he was no more worthy of his concern or compassion than a culture of bacteria  under a microscope lens. Even in his sedated state, the child whimpered slightly when Dr Lambert clicked into place, a small glass test tube to collect yet another blood sample for testing. The poor child’s arms were already dotted with the marks, testament to the previous samples already taken. As the distressed whine escaped the poor child’s lips, Andrews looked away. He was already filled with shame and remorse for what he had been part of, he didn’t need the wordless accusations of an infant to make him feel any worse. So, desperate to find something else to look at, Andrews gaze inadvertently fell on Lucy and her own child.

Holding her own baby so close to her chest, Lucy watched Dr Lambert with a strange look upon her withdrawn features. Doctor Lambert glanced down at his watch and recorded the time on a small label on the test tube of blood, pulled off his sterile rubber gloves
, and closed the side of the clear carrier. Lucy slowly rose from her seat and stepped over to the box. Then, as if she was afraid to startle the child held within, she gently placed her hand on the flat glass.

‘Lucy,’ Her mother said coldly, ‘sit back down
.  That thing is no concern of yours.’

Lucy silently looked back at her mother and then after giving the stolen child one final glance, returned to sit by her side. But as she turned
, Andrews saw something in the young girl’s eyes, something that would not have been expected, considering the infant was only here due to her actions, it was something he could only describe as maternal concern.

***

‘How far do you think we’ve come?’ said Liz, looking up from the map and through one of the spy holes to the passing countryside outside, devoid of any discernible markers.

‘Ten to fifteen miles,’ replied Phil, glancing back, ‘something like that, it’s difficult to tell
, but at least we’re making good time and covering a lot of ground as the crow flies.’

They had been steadily travelling along the tracks for over four hours now
, and beyond the wooden walls of their cart, the crisp spring morning had developed into a pleasantly warm afternoon. The going had been smooth and unusually unhampered by the presence of the Dead. In fact, they had only encountered two particularly sorry excuses on the tracks so far, and these had been found at the entrance to tunnels, crippled, and decayed beyond movement. Presumably, at some point, they had plummeted down onto the track from the bridges overhead and with nothing alive to draw them from their stupor, they had lain for years exposed to Nature’s elements. Of course, they still saw groups of the Dead wandering through the overgrown fields or along the road and lanes that ran parallel to the tracks, but with the high wire fence running either side of the tracks, the cart had effectively travelled in the safe manmade corridor and had passed them unnoticed.

‘Looks like there’s another tunnel coming up, Liz
,’ said Phil, ‘that should give you something to pinpoint where we are on the map.’             

‘Erm
, well, if we joined the tracks here,’ she began, holding the map out for the others in the back of the cart to see as her finger traced the train line, ‘and we’ve been through two tunnels, which must’ve been here and here, so, then that means we must be, here.’

‘Hmm
,’ said Karen thoughtfully, studying the map closely.

‘What?’ asked Liz.

‘Well,’ she began, ‘well, it’s just that if the crossings there and there were tunnels, and now so is this one, that only leaves two more points where  the train crosses the path of a road, before we’ll be in this built up area around the station of Carlyon bay.’

‘So?’ asked Stev
e.

‘So what if neither of these are level crossings either
,’ she replied, looking at each of her new companions as the realisation dawned on them.

‘Fuck! With the fence either side of us, we’ll be forced to go all the way to the end of the line at Carlyon bay station,’ said Patrick.

‘Exactly,’ said Karen, ‘and what’s the likelihood a station like that has a platform that’s level with the rails?’

‘Not very
.’ mumbled Patrick, taking the map from Liz. ‘Damn, we’d be stuck in a dead end surrounded by the hundreds if not thousands of the Dead.’

‘So the question is
, when do we abandon the tracks and try to get back on a road?’ Liz asked, as they were abruptly plunged into darkness while Delilah pulled them through the short tunnel.

‘We’ve got wire cutters
,’ she continued, as Delilah pulled them out the other side and once again the cart was flooded with disks of light spilling through the open spyholes, ‘so we can at least cut our way through whenever we want… but there’s no point leaving too soon.’

‘And we need to find a spot where the tracks are at least close to a road
,’ added Imran. 

After much
discussion, it was decided they would at least see whether the next point where the train line and a road crossed was a level crossing, or just another tunnel. After that, if they still hadn’t been able to get off the line, they would cut their way through the wire fence at the next suitable spot they came across. They had been moving for another twenty minutes when Phil pulled Delilah to a standstill.

‘Uh-Oh!’ he said, leaning forwards in his seat
. ‘Looks like we only have the next two hundred meters to leave the tracks or we’ll not be leaving it at all.’

‘What? Why?’ asked Patrick looking over the big man’s shoulders
. ‘Oh! Crap!’

There on the line ahead of them, like two motionless goliaths from an age gone by, were two stalled commuter trains completely blocking their passing.

‘Get us closer,’ said Patrick, patting Phil’s shoulder, ‘the one facing away from us looks slightly further along the track than the other one, there might be a way past.’

‘O
kay,’ said Phil, giving Delilah’s reins a flick.

‘Imran, could you take a look through the roof hatch at what’s either side of us
,’ Patrick continued, ‘keep an eye out for a possible way back to a road.’

‘Sure,’ said Imran climbing up on the benches
once again to stick his head in the upturned basket on the cart’s roof.

‘What can you see?’ asked Steve a few minutes later, craning his neck to look up at Imran.

‘Well, to our right, we’ve got a light woodland that starts about ten metres away from the fence and runs well past the trains,’ he replied, ducking his head briefly back down, ‘and to the left, well it looks like it used to be farmland of some sort, it’s pretty overgrown.’

‘Can you see anything that might have once been hedgerows?’ asked Phil.

‘Erm…’ Imran replied, reaching down to grab their battered pair of binoculars from a hook, ‘Err…Yeah… on the far side, there’s a wild overgrown hedgerow and, wait, there’s a break in the hedgerow in the far corner, it might be where there was a gate.’

‘And where’s there’s a gate…’ said Patrick.

‘There’s a way to get to it from the other side,’ finished Phil, realising they had found their way off the rail line and back onto a road of some sort.

‘Well, let’s not chuck the baby out with the bath water just yet,’ said Steve, ‘there might still be a way past the trains.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Phil, finally pulling Delilah to a stop again, ‘so, who fancies stretching their legs this time?’

‘I’ll go,’ replied Liz, already opening one of the side hatches to jump down to the weed infested gravel of the rail siding.

With the loose gravel crunching under her boots as she walked, Liz reached behind her to click free her sword from its sheath. With a whisper, the blade slid free and sliced through the air.  After a few practice swipes to loosen up the muscles in her shoulder, Liz knew she was ready. Walking up to the first of the trains, she paused. The train appeared to have been coming from Carlyon Bay when the power on the tracks had finally failed, or perhaps the driver had been attacked, she would never know for sure. The dark rust coloured stains on the inside of the driver’s cab certainly suggested it was more than power failure that had stalled this mighty machine. Liz knew that once it had become apparent the motorways were fast becoming nothing but clogged bloodbaths stalked by great hordes of the Dead, many people had flooded to the train stations hoping to get passage to the coast and the salvation it promised. They were so desperate to escape the mainland that in their rush, it was inevitable some of the bitten or those close to death had boarded these trains with them, condemning their fellow passengers to the very fate they were trying to flee.