Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel (15 page)

‘Fran…’ he began to say, fearful confusion in his voice.

‘Later,’ she replied, urgently grabbing his arm to pull him forward.

In the few seconds she had been delayed with Tom, Rod had limped onward and even though he was barely three or four paces ahead of them, Fran noticed the water level had risen considerably. Moving up from his calves, the water now churned and splashed about his thighs and continued to rise with each step

‘Are we going to be able to get across?’ she called to Rod, now waist deep in seawater.

‘Tide’s coming in real quick,’ he replied, briefly looking back at her. ‘If we’re lucky we’ll be past the worst of it before it goes much higher… just take it easy though… and stay on the cobbles. From here on in the causeway’s raised up from the surrounding beach, you step off it and it’ll get a lot deeper real quick… Oh, and this area’s notorious for rip tides,’ he continued, almost as an afterthought. ‘You get caught in one and you’ll be dragged out to sea within minutes… it’s what helps keep the Dead off the island.’

‘Now he tells us!’ said Fran, glancing worryingly at Tom.

Whether strange weather patterns were to blame, or it was simply that Rod had been mistaken about the rising tide, Fran didn’t care but the waves now splashing almost half way up her torso certainly gave cause for concern and just as Rod had warned, she could feel the growing pull of fast moving water tugging at her body as it sped past, threatening, given the chance, to whisk her away to a watery, if temporary, grave. Looking back, she saw a few of the Dead had already fallen foul to these treacherous tidal currents, their decaying muscles simply no match against the powerful force of the fast flowing water. In fact even as she worryingly scanned the encroaching Dead horde behind them one of the shambling figures slipped from sight, dragged beneath the waves by an unseen current.    

‘Rod, where…’ she began to ask just as her own foot missed the cobbled causeway beneath her, throwing her off balance and plunging her alarmingly under the dark rolling water with a splash.

Instantly her world became a smothering blackness of cold churning water claiming her body as its own and pulling it further under. She fought to regain her footing, kicking out her legs this way and that, but suddenly there was nothing below her but yet more emptiness. And then from the blackness she suddenly felt a hand latch onto the back of her jacket, pulling her backward. For a moment the terrifying image of Dead hands finding her amid the swirling gloom flashed through her panic stricken mind but then, almost as quickly as it had claimed her, the darkness parted and her head broke the surface of the waves.

‘I’ve got you, girl,’ said Tom, helping her fight against the current to regain her footing. ‘I’ve got you!’

‘Christ,’ she spluttered, spitting the salty water from her mouth as she steadied herself against him, ‘that was close… thanks.’

‘Run!’ cried Rod, the look in his eyes as he stared back at them, telling them all they needed to know.

Unable to help herself, Fran found her head turning, the compulsion to know her attackers overriding the all-consuming ball of panic blooming in her chest. What she saw made her breath catch in her throat and her fingers to curl in horror about Tom’s sturdy arm. Not only had the horde that Tom had originally led away from the beach returned, but drawn by the calls of the moaning cadavers, they had been joined by at least another thirty of the Dead residents of Marazion; all of them now ambling through the surf towards them. With the first wave of the hungry Dead barely ten metres behind them, Fran could take in every detail of the horrific visage of the closest corpses. Out in front, a good two strides ahead of his fellow Dead was an exceptionally tall and well-built corpse of a man. Dressed in what Fran thought may have once been camouflage army fatigues, the Dead man’s neck and chest was a blackened and shredded mess of ripped skin and muscle. But it was the look on his slack face that caught her attention. Even in his Dead state this man, who presumably had been a solider in life, clearly possessed a cold determination to reach her. With long purposeful but slow steps he advanced steadily through the water, the fast moving current having little effect on his sturdy frame. This was evidently a cadaver intent on feasting this day, and with Fran set in his milky sights a justifiable trickle of dread ran though her, forcing her shaking limbs into action.

‘Jesus!’ she gasped, her head spinning back around as her legs battled to increase the distance between the Dead soldier and herself.

‘
Come on, move, move, move
!’ she screamed to herself over and over again, her words almost becoming a mantra for her own immediate survival.

She was so intensely concentrating on simply putting one foot in front of the other that when the concrete harbour wall suddenly loomed, grey and imposing, to her left, it caught her quite by surprise.

‘
Almost there
!’ the words shouted in her mind as she fought against the imagined touch of Dead flesh upon her at any second. ‘
I’m almost there
!’

But cruel fate had not finished with the three survivors just yet and had decided not to relinquish her vindictive hold upon them quite so easily; she had one last trick still to play. So as Fran and Tom felt the level of the causeway begin to rise, their hopes of surviving rising with it, fate finally played her hand and they were met with the crushing sight of a high metal gate cutting them off from the island.

‘What?’ Fran began to say, unable to understand or accept what she was seeing.

‘Hey!’ shouted Rod, banging his fists frantically against the sheet metal, the echoes of his pounding sounding ominously like the tolling of a low funereal bell over the moans of the Dead. ‘Hey, is anyone there? It’s me, Rod, Rod Adams, open the gate you bastards! Open the fucking gate!’

Yet if anyone heard his cries they gave no indication of it and with the harbour wall rising high on one side and a sea wall on the other, there wasn’t even a way to tell if anyone was there at all.

‘They’ve… they’ve got to let us in!’ cried Fran, her fists joining Rod’s to hammer against the metal obstacle, fearful that barely a few metres away the Dead soldier leading his army of corpses steadily advanced on them.

Out the corner of her eye Fran saw Tom turn to face the oncoming Dead.

‘I’ll keep them off as long as I can,’ Tom growled to Fran and Rod, the waves crashing against him to send salty spray up his chest, ‘but we won’t have long.’

Both Rod and Fran knew unless someone opened the gate their choices were severely limited; be torn apart by the Dead or try and make a swim for it and as Rod had already warned them, if swimming was their only means of escaping death, it would likely be only a temporary one.

‘Get ready!’ said Tom, stepping forward to meet the Dead solider.

Sparing a glance over her shoulder at the man who was clearly putting himself in mortal danger to buy her a few precious seconds, Fran felt her fear and grief about to overwhelm her.

‘Please,’ she screamed, pounding her fists wildly against the gate. ‘Please…you’ve got to let us in. For fuck’s sake open the gate and let us in!’

Suddenly beyond the metal barrier, almost drowned out by the Dead and her own cries, she thought she heard something, something that perhaps promised hope, something that sounded like the sounds of a struggle followed by footsteps splashing though water.

‘Please, whoever’s there,’ she continued, glancing at Rod who had clearly heard someone on the other side of the gate too, ‘please, open the gate before it’s too late… please, for the love of God, open the fucking gate!’

‘No, don’t!’ came an unseen man’s voice calling out to someone. ‘Father Matthew gave strict orders…’

‘We can’t just let them die, Gregory,’ a second man replied, followed by the heavenly sound of chains clinking as they were moved aside, ‘this surely is not part of God’s plan… Father Matthew would not want…’

‘Brother Mark, do not presume…’ the man called Gregory snarled in interruption, his words full of ominous warning.

But whatever warning the man called Gregory was about to offer, it fell on deaf ears for with a grunt of effort cutting off his words, the man called Mark, began to open the gate. It had barely moved a few centimetres before Rod forced his fingers though the growing gap to help pull the heavy metal barrier.

‘Fran!’ yelled Rod, straining with the effort. ‘We can’t open it for long, get ready. As soon as it’s wide enough to get through, we move.’

‘Tom!’ she cried, giving Rod a nod of understanding. ‘The gate!’

‘Bit… busy!’ he growled, struggling to keep his hands locked under the Dead soldier’s snapping chin.

‘Almost there!’ shouted Rod, the gap just becoming wide enough for a person to squeeze through. ‘Get ready!’

‘Tom!’ Fran repeated, noticing if he didn’t break contact with the soldier soon his hungry friends behind him would be joining him.

‘I know!’ Tom replied, his head snapping back to look at Fran, a desperate acceptance in his eyes.

In the moment that their eyes locked Fran knew what Tom was about to do. Despite only knowing her for a few weeks he was about to truly sacrifice himself to save her.

‘
Oh no, you fucking don’t
,’ she thought to herself, pushing herself away from Rod and the gate.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ shouted Rod, pushing himself through the gap.

Reaching out to make a grab for her, his fingers barely brushed against the back of her jacket before she was beyond his reach and, as far as Rod was concerned, beyond hope as well.

‘Not for me, old man!’ shouted Fran, a stern look on her face as she wading up beside Tom. ‘Just get ready to push him back, Okay!’

‘Fran, what the!’ Tom shouted back at the young girl risking her life unnecessarily, his words going unheard as her head suddenly disappeared beneath the water.

Unlike before, this time she let the cold waters rush over her and welcomed the darkness as a friend. With her hand latched onto Tom’s belt for anchorage, Fran reached out with her free arm to find what she was looking for. Sure enough she almost immediately came into contact with one of the Dead soldier’s legs and followed it down to his foot. She was surprised when her fingers brushed against the cold lifeless flesh of his bare foot, clearly the soldier had died without his boots on, but it didn’t matter either way to her plan. So with her fingers wrapping tightly about his thick ankle, and a prayer for strength thrown to the Gods, Fran tugged with all her might. At first nothing happened but then as the soldier’s cadaver shifted his weight to continue his attack on Tom, her efforts bore fruit.

Above the waves, one minute the Dead man was standing before Tom, its face an animalistic snarling mask of death as it desperately fought to taste his flesh and the next it was tipping backwards away from him. Feeling the shift in the Dead man’s balance, Tom gave the soldier’s corpse one final hard shove, putting as much distance between him and it as he could. Almost immediately Fran’s head popped up in the water next to him, gulping for air.

‘Move!’ she managed to splutter between gasping breaths, knowing she had only bought them both a few seconds of grace.

‘Idiot!’ Tom snapped, slipping his arm about her waist before moving her round so she was in front of him as he strode up to the open gate.

With the girl who had saved his life being pulled through the gate by Rod and a set of arms from another unseen man, Tom hoped the gap was wide enough to allow his larger frame to pass through. As it was he needn’t have worried for no sooner than Fran was through the gap than she was pushing against the gate to make the opening just that bit wider.

‘Stop her!’ shouted the man called Gregory, up from where the cobbled causeway became a proper tarmacked road surface that led into the island. ‘She’ll get us all killed!’

Pushing as hard as he could to get through, Tom ignored the pain of metal scraping against his skin knowing a lot worse awaited him if he didn’t.

‘Come on, you… Bastard!’ he shouted, feeling some sort of bolt on the gate cutting into his thigh.

‘Fuuuccck!’ he yelled, finally popping though the gap like a man-sized champagne cork, the bolt gouging a bloody channel from his leg in the process.

‘Close the gate!’ Gregory almost screamed at them. ‘Close the gate!’  

Ignoring the shooting pain in his leg, Tom spun to help close the gate but, without wasting a second, Fran, Rod and Mark were already sliding the metal gate closed. Just before the gate ‘clicked’ back into place Tom saw the corpse of the Dead solider momentarily break the surface of the water beyond the gate before disappearing again, sucked beneath the waves and whisked away by the lethal swirling current. With the scene suddenly cut off by the sheet of metal, Tom turned his attention to the man who had saved their lives. With water dripping from his full beard and a head of blond curls, Tom guessed him to be in his mid-thirties. But it wasn’t the man’s physical appearance that spoke volumes to him but rather what he wore. Dressed in a dark red tabard, its sodden fabric turned to the colour of clotted blood by the sea water, it was worn over the normal everyday clothes that he would have expected those living on an island or by the sea to wear; but it was the golden cross embroidered in a circle of black that gave Tom cause for concern.