Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead (38 page)

‘
They don’t normally stay,
’ Wendy’s words from earlier in the Dome suddenly drifted back to her, bringing with them new and terrifying questions.

‘Jesus… how many more has she killed?’ Fran muttered aloud, the very sound of her voice agitating the two corpses in front of her. ‘She’s insane, she’s out of her mind… she must be… someone’s got stand up to her, got to stop her… she needs to be stopped.’

But even as she said the words, Fran knew any action had come far too late for Sam and Mike. They had crossed the teenager and fallen fowl of her sick mind. They had had something she wanted and to Wendy that simply made them an inconvenience, a problem to be dealt with however she chose. The young couple, guilty of nothing but the crime of merely existing, had become an obstacle standing in the way between Wendy and what she wanted; and clearly that thing she wanted had been Poppy.

Grateful that the blindfold at least spared her the sight of the young woman’s eyes, eyes that she knew death had transformed into terrible orbs burning with an unquenchable huger; Fran slowly pushed herself to her feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, wiping away an angry tear with the back of hand; the two cadavers continuing to strain against their bonds as she spoke, ‘I’m so sorry… you… you didn’t deserve this, either of you… But I’ll make her pay, I’ll make it right, I promise… and don’t worry, I’ll get Poppy back,’ she added, stepping closer to the writhing cadavers, ‘get her away from that psycho bitch… and I’ll look after her, find her somewhere safe, somewhere away from this madness… no matter what it takes… I promise, I’ll get her back and I’ll keep her safe.’

With that, Fran stepped round the two corpses to stand alongside them. Then, with her hand shaking slightly, she reached out to the thing that had once been Mike and took the top of its head firmly in her grasp. After a deep breath to steady herself, Fran then sharply pushed the head forward; forcing the chin down onto its blood-caked chest but more importantly at the same time exposing the relatively thin section of the skull at the top of the neck.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, just as she struck down with the butcher’s hook, lodging it deep in the back of the Dead man’s skull with a sickening ‘crack’.

With little more than a brief spasm shooting though the cadaver as the spike ripped through the delicate brain tissue, Mike’s body was finally laid to rest. Then, despite knowing that what had made Mike, his personality, hopes and dreams, had fled with his last heartbeat, Fran withdrew the hook with as much care as she could; doing her best to ignore the wet sucking sound as she did so.

‘Don’t worry, Mike,’ Fran softly muttered to the now motionless corpse, her eyes drifting unhappily to Dead woman still struggling behind it, ‘she’ll be along soon enough.’

And with those words, Fran reluctantly repeated the process, allowing the hook to fall once more; finally ending an unnatural existence and at last giving the woman’s body the eternal peace it deserved.

‘
What a fucking mess,
’ she thought to herself, rubbing her throbbing temples as she looked at the two lifeless corpses in front of her. ‘But I’m going to make that bitch pay for this… I swear to you both… she’ll pay,’ she went on to whisper, making her promise not only to the young couple whose lives had been so pointlessly cut short but also to herself.

Knowing that she had done all that could be done for Sam and Mike, Fran began to make her way back through the long dark room; weaving her way through the warren of shelves in search of a way out. With each cloaked nook and recess she passed, she would tentatively probe it, hopeful for a doorway or window that may offer escape but each time she was met with yet more shelves or simply a grimy soot covered blank wall.

‘Right… so nothing helpful back there,’ she muttered, when she finally returned to the spot where she had initially regained consciousness, glancing once more up at the narrow windows; the small cleaned patch still her only light source to go by. ‘I guess that leaves me with one direction to…’ she started to mumble just as she was abruptly plunged into total darkness. ‘What the…’ she said aloud, the dim moonlight suddenly returning again just as quickly as it had vanished. ‘
Oh
,
must’ve got cloudy out there
,’ she realised, feeling rather foolish that she had been so startled by clouds merely crossing the moon.

Knowing, thanks to Wendy and Angela’s departure, that there was at least one door somewhere in the dark shadows ahead of her, Fran slowly continued her way past more blackened shelves laden with smoked meat; all the while the meagre moonlight behind her becoming fainter and fainter with each step. She was just passing a deeply shaded shelf that from the silhouette seemed to have the body of a headless dog or fox on it, when she noticed very large shape hanging from the ceiling a few steps ahead of her; a shape that in the darkness was little more than a block of darker shadow blocking her path.

‘
The deer,
’ she thought, remembering the large animal carcass she had seen earlier; her hand automatically reaching out to push the animal aside as she stepped forward.

Yet as she closed the gap, her fingertips just shy of brushing against the hanging object, she paused; a sense of dread suddenly blooming within her. For something was different here, something very wrong, something that smelled of…

‘Blood!’ she gasped, her single spoken word causing the dark shadow in front of her to violently jerk and twist. ‘Jesus!’ she cried, throwing herself backwards; noisily colliding with the shelf behind her and sending its contents tumbling across the floor.

For a moment Fran simply stood there, motionless, watching as the dark shadow thrashed and twisted mid-air; momentarily disappearing from sight only to reappear again as another cloud drifted across the moon. And then as if a switch had been flicked in her brain, she was moving again.

‘Light! I… I need more light!’ scrambled Fran, pushing herself away from the shelves to stumble back towards the table, crashing into things as she went. ‘More light… I… I need to see... I need to see,’ she continued, hurriedly clambering up onto the table, her growing dread forcing her to gulp down ragged painful gasps. ‘I need to see… please, I need to see… God… please… no… I… I need to see!’ she started to sob as she frantically moved her hands across the sooty glass, letting just that bit more light in with each passing. Suddenly she stopped moving, her eyes locked on her blackened hands shaking against the near-clear glass in front of her and in that instant she knew whatever she saw when she turned would change her; would change her world forever.

‘Please…’ she whispered once more to the heavens as she began to turn, her plea broken by the sob catching in her throat.

And then in an instant her world was torn apart.

‘No!’ she cried, collapsing to her knees, shaking her head in hopeless denial as the moonlight spilled across a blood covered T-shirt; a T-shirt emblazoned with a Batman logo.

‘My favourite,’ a man’s voice, ghost like and distant, flitted across her mind; bubbling up from a memory.

‘No… please, no…God, please!’ she wept, her shaking fingers clamping across her lips as if to restrain the terrible madness that threatened to erupt from her. ‘Kai! No, Kai! Please, No!’

And then with a heart wrenching cry, she let the madness claim her.

***

Fran didn’t know how long she lay curled in a ball, cradling Kai’s body in her lap; his blood cold and slick beneath her. In fact she only barely remembered clawing her way back across the room, weeping uncontrollably as a pain, up until then unimaginable, tore through her chest and flayed her soul bare. She saw flashes of herself distraught on her knees before him, desperate to free him of the torment that death had forced upon his body, yet at the same time unable to bring herself to accept the nightmare before her as real. For to act was to accept this loss; to acknowledge that Kai had been taken from her forever and to ultimately admit that she was now truly alone. Yet act she did, such was her love for this young man who had come into her life and even as she later held him lovingly on the cold floor she saw herself, as if watching from afar, plunging the hook deep into the base of his skull to free him. Over and over again the memory repeated itself as she wept, her tears washing the rivulets of blood from his pale face, until finally every detail of the act had been branded into her very being.

‘Don’t leave me, Kai… please… please don’t go,’ she begged, her words tearful whispers as she gently brushed her fingers down his cheek; holding his body close, desperate to feel him embrace her back just one more time, ‘please… I … I need you, Kai,’ she continued, kissing his forehead as more of her heavy tears fell. ‘We… we were going to beat this, we promised... you and me, we would see this through...’ she whispered, moving a stray lock of his dark hair out of his face. ‘See the end of them… the end of the Dead… we were going to see life go back to normal… we promised… you and me, together… you promised… you and me… we would see the end of them…’

Yet even as the words bubbled forth she knew their promises had been but a pipe dream; mere wishful words of the lost as they dreamed for a better tomorrow. But now they would never know what could have been. For that tomorrow and all the tomorrows they could have had together had been stolen from them; all those possibilities and futures forever gone with the slash of a blade and the parting of skin. All those hopes, dreams, loves, kisses, smiles, tears, conversations and arguments, make-ups and nights held in each other’s arms, they were all no more; snuffed out like the extinguishing of a candle, plunging her into a darkness from which she saw no escape.

But then in the dark abyss that was her grief, a spark flared; so brief at first she almost missed it. Yet it flared again and then again; crying out to her across the sea of her loss and pain, reaching for her, nameless and indistinct. And then, before she knew what was happening, she found her own mind answering this call, clawing its way past her sorrow and grief; desperate to fill the void that Kai’s death had left within her. Slowly at first and then with increasing urgency she reached out for the spark, even as it too reached out for her in its own unfathomable way; and then as they met a warmth and a rage born of a burning sun spread throughout her. And with it came knowledge, for she now knew the spark, its form, it name and measure; for it was revenge and she would command it totally.

‘They knew… they all knew…’ she later croaked, her voice harsh and raw from crying, as she took Kai’s cold hand in hers, holding it against her cheek ‘All of them… they knew what would happen… from the moment we stepped off that barge, they knew,’ she continued, softly kissing his blood stained fingers as she looked into his pale lifeless face. ‘Not one of them will go un-punished… I swear…not one of them… They… they have so much blood on their hands… so much,’ she added, realising they were surely not the first to fall foul of those at White Oak Park. ‘But it stops now… no more… never again.’

Lapsing into a numb silence, Fran simply looked at Kai, her eyes searching his face, burning every aspect of him into her memory; for she knew she would soon have to leave him if she was to make good on her promise to both him and Sam and Mike. It was a promise that she had made gladly to her lost friends and a promise that she swore to her lost love; it was a promise that demanded blood and with her rage she was the blade that would draw it from the guilty.

‘I… I’m sorry, Kai, I… ’ she finally whispered, lowering her head to rest against his chest, his cold fingers still entwined in hers. ‘
He’s really gone,
’ she suddenly thought to herself, the shock of the silence that met her ear making the nightmare all that more real and final. ‘Kai, I’ve got to go… I’ve got to leave you now,’ she continued, kissing the back of his hand as fresh heavy tears bloomed in her eyes, ‘I’ve got to find a way out of here so I can stop them… I don’t want to leave but you know I must… I… I love you so much… I just wish… I... I truly love you…I’m sorry, Kai… I’m just so sorry.’

And with that, she let his cold hand slip from hers, gently positioned it upon his chest and then, before her churning grief could swallow her whole again, she slowly and with great care eased Kai off her lap.

‘I’ll… I’ll never forget you,’ she said, shakily wiping away her tears before wearily pushing herself up from her knees; finally ready to continue her search of the room. ‘
I… I can do this,
’ she thought to herself, sparing Kai’s lifeless body one last sorrowful glance before stepping past him to check out the rest of the room. ‘
I have to.
’

Unfortunately the far end of the room seemed to be much like the rest, shelves, animal meat, piles of chopped wood and a thin layer of soot that seemed to be everywhere; that was until she found the door. Made of wood and clearly bolted from the outside, the door was covered in a thick almost tacky film of grime and if she wanted to get through it any time soon Fran knew she was going to have to come up with something a little more effective than hacking away at it with a hook for the next hour or so. She was just building up the courage to double back and recheck the room just in case she had missed something when she noticed, deep in the shadows to her right, a small metal filing cabinet partly hidden under what looked to be a folded tarpaulin.

‘Hmmm, maybe…’ she muttered, hoping that if she couldn’t find a way out of the smoke house she may at least find a better weapon for when they did eventually come for her. ‘
With all this meat there
has to be a knife in this room somewhere,
’ she thought to herself, pushing aside the tarpaulin to jiggle and pull the small cabinet out of the shadows and further into the moonlit room. ‘Perhaps…’ she continued, pulling open the top drawer, hopeful to find something of use.