Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel (14 page)

‘Shit!’ spat Tom, the sight of the Dead horde so close behind him giving much needed speed to his already aching arms and legs.

With his fingers curling about the iron railing running atop of promenade seawall, Tom pushed aside the pain from his protesting muscles and with a shout of determination escaping his lips, he pulled himself up and over the wall. Behind him, the decaying fingers brushed tantalisingly close to his fleeing legs, their deadly grasp closing about nothing but air and disappointment.

‘Too slow, you fuckers!’ Tom cried, whooping with glee as he spared a brief glance at the Dead, their decaying brains trying to understand how their fleshy prize had eluded them.

Yet even now Tom knew he had only momentarily escaped them. To his right glass shattered and lose doors creaked on rusted hinges as yet more of the Dead, drawn by Tom’s voice and the excited calls of their hungry comrades, began to slowly drag themselves from the abandoned shops and hotels on his right.

‘Daddy!’ Tom heard one of his daughters calling out to him, the word coming to him in a rise and falling sing-song way.

‘Not now sweet-pea,’ he mumbled in reply to the voice only he could hear. ‘Daddy’s got to…’

‘Tom,’ his wife called, her interrupting plea joining that of her deceased child.

‘Save his arse,’ he continued, swiftly pulling the sickles from the straps on his back to slash out at the figure of a Dead woman that had just managed to pull her head up above the level of the railing.

With a wet gurgle, the Dead woman’s head suddenly tilted back, the slice across her withered throat gaping as the weight of her own skull tore the gash further open. But Tom did not have time to enjoy his handiwork upon the woman’s corpse, for already more of the Dead horde about her had begun to claw their way up onto the promenade wall.

‘
Time to go
,’ Tom managed to coherently think to himself, fighting against the cacophony of ghostly voices in his head.

Breaking into a jog, Tom deftly wove in and out of the wrecked cars and scattered detritus that littered the road ahead of him, but with the Harbour Master’s office still a good two hundred metres further down the road he knew another life threatening encounter with the Dead was unavoidable. With each footstep he took and with each second that passed, more and more of the rotting cadavers appeared along the pavement, eager to locate the source of life that had enticed their Dead brothers and sisters so. And as was their way, as each rotting corpse moved its head desperately back and forth in its search, one more set of film-covered eyes locked hungrily on Tom’s form.

Despite the stitch pinching at his side with every step, Tom knew he had no time to waste. Already, ahead of him, some of the shambling figures had reached his side of the road and with as much speed as their atrophied bodies could provide them, they advance towards him. Yet he could not turn back or change his path, the only way for Tom was onward. This was his only option, he had to meet them head on, get past them, hopefully alive and unscathed, and join Fran and her newly found acquaintance in their trip across the causeway to the island and the safety it promised.

‘Fuck off!’ he barked, his blade cleanly removing an out-stretched arm when he encountered the first of the hungry residents of Marazion.

‘And you, buddy!’ Tom growled when the now armless man seemed to almost moan in protest at the sudden loss of his limb.

But Tom instantly dismissed the Dead man from his thoughts, reducing him from a specific opponent back to just one of many rotting corpses he needed to get past. But others were all too eager to claim their moment in the spotlight of Tom’s fury. One by one they stepped forward, each determined to be the one to feel his flesh between their teeth and the warm splash of his coppery blood upon their withered tongues, but by some miracle, one by one Tom evaded them all. Some he simply sidestepped or their arms were ducked under, while others felt, or rather didn’t feel, the cold razor edge of his blood smeared sickles slicing through their Dead flesh. With each step he took to get closer to his goal, he gladly gave himself over to the appeasement of his murdered family. He fed on their pain, he allowed their righteous anger wash over him and he quenched their demands for revenge, one fallen corpse at a time.

Yet still the corpses came. They clambered through broken windows, crawled out from dark shadowy shop-fronts and pushed their way through wild overgrown gardens. At one point a large ‘crashing’ sound briefly caught Tom’s attention amid the melee and in the split second it took to locate its source, he took in every horrendous detail of the Dead woman as she pulled herself through the shattered window of a hotel lobby. Such was her compulsion to get to Tom, that nothing would stop her, not even the physical restriction of her own decaying shell. So when one of her rotting arms became caught on a large shard of glass she simply moved onward regardless, letting the putrid flesh and cartilage tear and split at the shoulder until she ultimately continued on without the limb at all.

What happened next to the woman, Tom had no idea. Her moment of recognition had passed and he was once again willingly drowning himself in the clotted blood of his Dead foes. And then all of a sudden, quite unexpectedly, the Harbour Master’s office loomed in front of him, the cable Fran had used to descend from the roof still swinging slightly back and forth, tapping rhythmically against the filthy smeared glass of a window.

‘Rod!’ came Fran’s frantic scream, instantly snapping Tom’s attention back to the nightmare pace of reality.

Kicking aside the corpse of a teenage boy, the fact that its lower jaw was completely missing rendering it quite impotent in its hunt for flesh, Tom sprinted round the corner of the building praying he wasn’t too late to come to Fran’s aid.

Ahead of him on the beach, a mere twenty metres past the open gate, and fighting calf-deep in lapping seawater was Fran. To his relief, he saw that she seemed to be holding her own against her three Dead attackers for now but her new companion from the roof however was another matter entirely. Flat on his back and thrashing about in the water, the man desperately fought to not only keep his head above water but also the snapping jaws of a large corpse on top of him from taking a bite out of his arms. If the man, who Tom assumed was called Rod, had only this one cadaver to deal with then he would have given him the benefit of at least a fighting chance of surviving the next few minutes but with a further six other hungry corpses shambling ever closer to him, his chances certainly looked slim.

‘Yaahhhh!’ Tom yelled, frantically waving his arms about as he ran forward, hoping to draw some of the approaching cadavers’ attention away from Rod and onto himself.

Fran heard Tom’s war cry and the unexpected wave of emotion that flooded through her threatened to erupt from her throat as a sob of exhaustive relief. To have come this far and to have the sanctuary they sought so close only to fall to the Dead now, seemed to Fran like some tasteless divine joke not only at their expense but with only one possible punchline to finish it off, namely, their deaths.

When she and Rod had darted past the Dead and made it through the open gate unnoticed, she dared to think that luck was going to be with them for change; but sadly fate had other ideas for them. It wasn’t until they had ran down onto the beach, their boots hammering against the wet cobbles of the causeway that things had quickly gone from bad to worse. First, Rod, hobbling as fast as his twisted ankle would allow, slipped slightly on a patch of wet seaweed and although he manage to stay upright and carried on running, the sudden jarring movement sent a fresh spasm of pain shooting up his leg, causing him to cry out. This in itself was dangerous enough when you were exposed among the Dead as they were, but the fact that almost half a dozen unseen copses had been scrabbling at the unchecked wall of the building, his cry had been more like a loud and an eagerly anticipated dinner gong.

Quicker than she thought possible the Dead were upon them and even as she fought to keep the grasping hands a bay, she saw more and more hungry corpses along the beach starting to turn in their direction, drawn by the excited moans of their ravenous comrades in death. At some point Rod had suddenly crashed to his knees, pulled down under the weight of a tall Dead man who had latched onto the back of his shoulders, the cadaver’s open mouth a wide chasm of broken blackened teeth about to bare down onto the flesh of his neck. Luckily thinking on his feet, or rather on his knees, Rod abruptly threw himself forward into the water, twisting in the cadaver’s grasp as he fell, briefly freeing himself and saving his life.

Tom cried in rage as he sprinted down the causeway and into the rising tide. Charging toward Fran and Rod, the cold seawater crashing up his legs with each step, he barely had time to think before his sickles struck decaying flesh once again. With almighty swipes of his blades, two Dead heads spun through the air, landing with a splash before disappearing under the churning water, their decapitated bodies swaying briefly before slumping to their knees and following them.

‘Come on, you fucking bastards!’ he yelled, roughly shoving a Dead woman’s corpse aside with his shoulder as he thundered past her before barrelling into a second, sending her flying into the shambling form of a Dead man, his torn naked back almost stripped of its skin.

‘Tom!’ cried, Fran, her fingers latched around the back of an emaciated Dead man’s neck, her fingers tearing through his rotting skin to grip tightly onto his vertebrae. ‘Help Rod, he’s drowning!’

Glancing in Rod’s direction, Tom saw what Fran meant. With the large Dead man still struggling to get living flesh between his teeth, Rod was forced to keep him at arm’s length and was continually being plunged beneath the churning water; his face only appearing above the waves long enough to gulp down air before disappearing again.

‘But are you?’ Tom began to ask, not wanting to trade the life of the young woman he thought of a friend for that of the stranger.

‘I’m… fine!’ she growled through her gritted teeth, the crunching and snapping of neck bones punctuating each word. ‘Just help him!’

Before he had even taken two wave crashing steps in Rod’s direction, Tom heard the body of the skeletally thin Dead man that Fran had been dealing with, fall from her grasp; his spinal cord now nothing more than a shredded mess.

For a brief moment Rod’s face suddenly appeared above the water, spluttering as he fought for air, his panic filled eyes locking with Tom’s.

‘Hold on!’ Tom shouted, as Rod disappeared beneath the waves again.

Closing the gap between them with a single stride, Tom slipped the sickle in his left hand back into the strapping on his back, stepped behind the thrashing corpse and deftly moved his now empty hand from the back of its skull over to its forehead, before forcing his fingers deep into the creature’s eye sockets.

‘Fuck!’ he yelled in disgust, feeling the film covered eyeballs popping under the pressure.

Although now totally blind the Dead man’s resolve to get to Rod hardly abated to any noticeable degree, but then Tom didn’t expect it to. What it did do was give him the leverage he needed.

‘You Dead… Fucker!’ snarled Tom, yanking the Dead man’s skull sharply back with a fierce tug.

Despite the sickening grinding of bone on bone, the Dead man’s neck refused to break, but that was of no matter, for already the sickle in Tom’s right hand was carving through the exposed flesh of his mouldy neck. His blade sliced cleanly through the Dead man’s oesophagus and trachea, it snapped taught leathery tendons and parted dark rotten flesh from bone until, thanks to the force of Tom’s pulling grip, the head was practically cut free. With only the spinal column and a spattering of muscle fibre still holding the head in place, Tom gave his hand a sharp twist and then at last the job was done.

Instantly Rod shot up from the water, coughing and spluttering for air.

‘Come on,’ said Tom, tossing the head nonchalantly away to give the man a hand, ‘you can breathe later, mate… we’ve got to go.’

‘Thanks, I…’ Rod began to say, using Tom’s grip to pull himself upright again.

‘No time!’ shouted, Fran, suddenly pushing the two men onward. ‘Move!’

If either of the two men had any hope that Fran was exaggerating their situation, the thought disappeared instantly when they glanced over her shoulder at the thirty to forty strong throng of hungry corpses crashing through the waves toward them.

‘Sh… shit!’ panted Rod, still leaning on Tom for support as he fought to pull in more much needed air.

‘Exactly,’ agreed Fran, almost pulling the two men with her. ‘Now, move!’

For a moment Tom seemed mesmerised by the wave of death that shambled awkwardly through the surf toward them, the voices of his lost family once again demanding further recompense for their bloody and untimely deaths. Noticing that he seemed frozen in place, his lips silently moving in conversation, Fran forcibly grabbed his chin to make him look at her, praying she could break through the deadly spell he was under. 

‘Tom!’ she shouted, fearful he was losing himself again to the darkness that dwelled within him. ‘Tom, we’ve got to go! Now!’

Blinking, Tom fought to focus on the young woman in front of him, a strange mix of concern and fear on her face.

‘Tom!’ she repeated, her eyes flitting across his face looking for some sign of recognition.

With the Dead behind them getting ever closer, each second it took for Tom to break free of his internal dialogue seemed to be an aching eternity to Fran, but then something indefinable seemed to clear within his eyes and then instantly the man was once again with her.