Class Four: Those Who Survive

by Duncan P. Bradshaw

  Leaving the skeletal remains behind, Francis walked over to the boy, who was still indicating the building, the only thing in the entire area which wasn’t defined wholly as ‘Nature’.

  “Can we go in? Please, please, please, can we go in Francis?” Nathan beseeched, bouncing up and down with the combined excitement of Chris Rabbit on a pogo stick.

  Francis peered at the foreboding building and its surroundings. Patches of long grass and weeds suggested that it hadn’t been visited for some time. “Fine, but you know the rules. Stay behind me, okay?”

  Nathan nodded furiously. “Yay,” he shouted and ran to the fence. “How are we going to get in, Francis. I can’t climb over this, and it looks like it goes on for miles.”

  Pulling the rucksack up higher, Francis pointed through the fence to a gateway in the distance. “Looks like only one way in, kid. Over there, see? Stay with me, don’t run off. There could be anything in the forest that we can’t see, okay?”

  A loud sigh answered him in the affirmative, and Nathan grudgingly trudged by Francis’ side, running his fingers along the fence making dull thuds and clangs as he pulled on it. “What do you think it is, Francis? Is it a hospital or something? Did men work here? Why was it near the train track? Wh—”

  Francis raised his finger to his mouth. “Slow down, kid, too many questions. Sometimes you need to just take your time and see for yourself, okay? It ain’t going anywhere. It’s not as if we’ll get to the gate and it’ll disappear, eh? Just relax, have a look around, try and get a feel for the lay of the land, you know?”

  Nathan rubbed his hands together to get rid of the rust flakes he had collected thus far. He grinned inanely and nodded. Francis smiled.

  “So who do you reckon lived here? Do you think there are any comics here? Is that a dead man over there? Do you reckon he was dead-dead or just dead?” Nathan gibbered.

  Francis sighed and picked up the pace.

  “Why is that skellington tied to the gate door, Francis? Is he like a Halloween man to keep the baddies out?” Nathan asked.

  Francis looked over the pile of bones lying at the base of the closed half of the gateway. He picked through the macabre collection, but couldn’t find anything of use. “There were a couple of people here, look.” He pointed to two spinal columns; one still with a skull atop was affixed to the fence with twine, another lay on a mound of bones.

  A pair of wrists and the withered remains of hands were bound to the fence with cable ties. Teeth-marks were visible as little indentations in the black plastic. “Stay close to me, Nate. There might still be some around, okay?”

  Nathan nodded solemnly and looked through the open side and pointed to a scorched patch of ground beyond. “Look over there, Francis.”

  The pair walked into a barren area of ground. A large blackened patch of concrete was the picnic blanket for yet more bones. Francis walked to the epicentre and surveyed the scene.

  A charred, chipped metal bar lay atop a ragged and weather-ruined sheepskin coat, which covered a pile of scorched bones. What looked like metal teeth were embedded in the ground. It was as if they stood in the retort of a crematorium.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” muttered Francis.

  Nathan tugged the man’s sleeve. “Come on, let’s go inside and have a look, pur-lease, you did say.”

  Francis flicked the police baton and it extended swiftly. “I did, but I still don’t like it. Come on, let’s get this done.” A rub of the beard and Francis cautiously edged towards the front double doors, which swung lazily off the latch.

  Inside looked like an ossuary. From the entrance, looking down towards the far end where haphazard rows of foldaway beds lay dormant, it was clear that a feasting frenzy had gone on here.

  Clumps of gnawed bone and rags of cloth formed cairns which were dotted around in a seemingly random pattern. There were clusters here and there, mainly towards the side doors; the draught made the tattered flags flutter gently.

  Even Nathan’s youthful enthusiasm had been left at the door. The musty smell of broken bone, rotten meat and death was all pervading. Not even an overdose of Vanish would purge the stench from their clothes.

  “I’m scared, Francis,” Nathan whimpered and held out his hand to his protector. Francis closed his hand over it and held on tight.

  “Let’s have a look up here, see if we can find anything. This place is giving me the creeps.” Francis sidled over to a metal stairway, taking a moment to stare at a collection of photos and handwritten notes on a wall. It seemed to be some kind of memorial. Upon looking at a picture of a sleeping child, with an emotional eulogy scrawled into the paintwork beneath, he led the way up the stairs, the baton held out, ready.

  A door opened into an office. A large chair faced out towards the window, as if a game of football was going on outside. Another decomposing body lay on the floor; its limbs were splayed out like a starfish amputee. Where the head should’ve been was a mass of congealed blood and jelly. Chips of skull and assorted head bone were arrayed around the impact site. “Go and check the desk, Nate. I’ll have a look through these cabinets.”

  All of the drawers were bereft of useful items; some held bushels of yellowing invoices on official looking headed paper. A faded cherubic angel grinned back. Within another, he found partially completed performance reviews. He wondered what a Mr Squire had done to merit so many HR ‘discussions’.

  “Francis, do you know who Mr Daniels is?” Nathan asked, barely visible behind the desk.

  “No, what have you got?”

  “I think Mr Daniels left his drink at work. It’s got his name on it. Jack Daniels, do you think he worked here?” Nathan held up a square bottle of bourbon, the label was badly faded except for the name.

  “Ha, no, I haven’t spoken to Jack Daniels in a long time now,” Francis said, looking down at the floor and rubbing his beard.

  “Did you and Jack have a falling out? Is he not your friend anymore?” Nathan asked, turning the bottle round in his hands. Taking the lid off, one whiff made his nose scrunch up and he screwed it back on. “Smells horrible.”

  Francis took the bottle and held it up to the light. “Yeah, you could say we don’t see eye to eye anymore. How about we leave this here, in case Mr Daniels gets back and looks for it, yeah?”

  Nathan nodded, took the offered item and put it back into the hinterland of the drawer where he had found it. “Nothing else here, except some pens and these little metal faces.” Small fingers held up the item for inspection.

  “Paper clips, they’re paper clips. You never know, though, they might be handy. Put them in your pocket. Could make fish hooks at a push,” Francis said distractedly. “Did you hear something?”

  Francis got to the office doorway and looked into the guts of the building. There was a scraping sound composed with a familiar moaning melody. Across the far end, there was a folding bed being taken for a walk. Well, it was being dragged by the feet of a figure that didn’t look quite right. In the sense that their head was tilted at an angle which would only be of use if you wanted to look round a corner whilst standing flush to a wall.

  One moan became legion as shapes loomed from shadowy corners of the building. The room was alive with the sound of undead music. “Nate, get here now, we gotta leave,” Francis hissed. He ducked down, but his guts, and their rapid loosening, told him that they had already been spotted.

  Nathan scooted across the office floor to Francis, taking a detour round grey dead person, past the brain goo roundabout and over to the one and only exit which didn’t end in face-planting concrete.

  With optional pirouette and screaming.

  “Right kid, here’s what we are gonna do…”

  Chapter Seven

  “You clear, Nate?” Francis asked breathlessly. The sneaky peeks he’d taken over the railing into the building had merely added to the picture that they needed to get out of Dodge.

  Sharpish.

  The kid nodded slowly, his
arms wrapped around his legs, held tight to his chest. “Good, let’s go.” Francis crept down the stairs.

  Before he’d made it to the bottom, a chap with an arm missing, dressed in black with a blood-flecked mask lunged at him and tried to grab hold with his one remaining hand. Francis recoiled in time and the zombie head-butted a stanchion.

  The baton swung and connected with the zombie’s head. The ballistic face mask repelled the blow with ease. The reverberations ran up Francis’ arm, through his funny bone and into his shoulder. A muffled growl signalled the walking cadaver’s displeasure and pawed at him again. It was easily dodged and Francis swung low, sending the attacker crumpling to the floor with a smack to the back of its knees.

  With a small escape window open to him, he trotted to the front double doors. “Come on, kid, let’s—” He looked around to see a Nathan-shaped hole where he expected a child to be. He frantically looked around the dusty building. “Nathan!” he bellowed. A whimpering from above him was the kid’s locator beacon.

  Francis ran to the bottom of the stairs, kneeing the rising masked zombie in the base of the skull as he made his way past. Sent back into the concrete, the zed’s one arm restarted the pain in the arse process of lifting himself off the floor again.

  Between Francis at the bottom of the stairs and Nathan cowering at the top was a young slip of a man; tall, wiry, dressed in low-slung jeans which showed off his heavily stained undercrackers. A leather jacket covered a gore encrusted YOLO t-shirt and a baseball cap sat at a jaunty angle on his head.

  Francis wanted to stove his head in even before noticing the tell-tale signs of reanimation. Black lumpy veins ran like industrial run-off rivers over his outstretched hands.

  YOLO looked from Francis and then up to a smaller, yet more sumptuous, looking meal. Like a slinky in reverse, he clumped up the stairs with a regimented regularity. Francis bounded up the stairs and grabbed hold of the dead yoof by his pant elastic. With a side step and a mighty heave, he slung the zombie down the stairs. It landed face first, causing a number of teeth to chip and ping off across the floor. Its jeans, though, held firm, still showing off a band of gaudily stained pantaloons.

  “I thought you were gonna follow the plan, Nate?” Francis said as he thundered up the staircase. Nathan was still in the egg position. Unblinking eyes stared straight through Francis’ sizeable frame and onto the wall beyond.

  “Kid, hey kid. It’s alright. I’m here, come on, we have to go. Like now.”

  Francis picked up Nathan. The kid’s body felt as if it was wrought from iron and incapable of suppleness. Only when he was cast over the shoulder did he relax and allow himself to fold over his saviour’s grasp. “Let’s roll, kid,” Francis whispered and turned around, ready to begin the descent.

  “Balls.”

  A congregation of now useless organ donors were milling around the base of the staircase. YOLO slapped a dead hand on the bannister and began to haul himself back up. Broken rows of gnashers chomped on thin air in anticipation. Behind him, it was now three deep, with more and more of the ravenous dead descending on them from seemingly never-ending hiding spots.

  With a heavy sigh, Francis placed Nathan back onto the floor behind him. He instinctively readopted his sitting foetal position and thousand yard stare. Francis removed his rucksack and placed it next to the inert child. “Look after this, Nate,” he muttered.

  In a mini re-enactment of the Battle of Thermopylae, Francis stood defiant at the top of the stairs, funnelling the dead towards him. At most he reckoned they could manage two abreast. White knuckles clenched the baton. He braced his legs like a baseball player and awaited the first of the zombie Persians.

  “Molon labe,” he growled.

  YOLO lumbered forwards and was met with a violent smack across the temple which rocked his skull against the collarbone. When he looked back, Francis could see that the frontal bone had cracked down the coronal suture, and had partially sheared off. The baseball cap stretched where the bones had separated like a door being kicked open. The force had torn the skin from the top of the nose down to the corner of his lip; an eye slipped through the hole and hung in his open mouth.

  An autonomic response to seeing food in front of him, YOLO’s jaw chewed down and bit into his own ocular device. There followed a crunching sound as if a heavy foot had stood on a cockroach, making Francis’ gorge rise.

  He swung again with a powerful backhand and the force knocked the zombie across to the bannister. A forceful meeting with the sole of his boot sent YOLO flying over the edge and crashing into the floor. The zed twitched twice and was then becalmed; a half bowl of skull weebled its way across the floor, followed by a tide of black and grey sludge.

  The sense of victory was short-lived as doleful moans from below him brought him back to reality. “This is going to be a long day…” Francis readied himself again as a female zombie sous chef dragged her broken and twisted leg up the stairs towards him, with all the grace of a concrete laden milk float.

  With four flat tyres.

  And a penguin driving.

  The sound from the back of the building made every single thing, living and dead, stop and turn in its direction. At first there was nothing. Just as the sound faded into memory, something wailed again.

  COUGH, COUGH, COUGH.

  “Fuck me, that’s gonna leave a mark. Mental note, find some motherfucking Lockets,” a man’s voice echoed out.

  A robed figure staggered out of a back storeroom, holding a staff aloft. An atrophied zombie which had an arm tied to the floor by a length of frayed rope went to reach for him, mustering a less than scary ”Gahh.”

  The figure stopped and brought the staff down with a quick flick of the wrist. The zombie’s head, down to its neck, split in two. Discoloured meat and built up fetid fluid spilled onto the floor.

  Most of the undead host were now focused solely on the enigmatic stranger on the horizon. Sure it had more wrapping on it, but they were drawn to the sound like sailors to a siren’s song.

  The man walked towards them, his weapon now held in one hand, the grey robe still covering his features.

  So enraptured was Francis that he only saw the sous chef pounce at the last moment. He bobbed back and her momentum made her overreach. Francis took advantage of his good fortune with a vicious downward smash onto the back of her head. Her face bounced off the stairs, leaving chevron imprints on her necrotic skin. Her nose had been completely flattened and one of her eye sockets was cracked. Withered skin was folded inside the split, pulling her skin taut.

  As she rose, he kicked her under the chin and sent her careening through the air. Her whirling backflip was ended as velocity faded and she collapsed to the floor in a mass of broken bone and ruptured tendons. She elicited a pathetic whimper and her unlife evaporated.

  The undead horde advanced upon the now stationary figure. Francis checked the stairs, relieved he was finally bereft of zombie guests. He rested his elbows against the railing and prepared to watch the show.

  “Nate, get up, get ready. We’ll make a move in a minute. This guy must have a death wish.” With no popcorn and odds of twenty to one against, he didn’t think it would last too long.

  He was right.

  The dead throng formed a loose semi-circle in front of the lone ranger. The grip on the staff had changed from the middle to one end; it looked like he was holding a giant sword. As the first of the gang made their move, Francis saw two things flash.

  The first was a glint from either end of the staff; each a foot long beam of shimmering silvery light.

  The second was as the man tilted his head back, and the robe rose enough to showcase a beaming smile.

  In precisely one point three seconds, the staff had been pulled back behind the figure to shoulder height, and then swung round at full extension in a 360 degree rotation.

  By the time he had returned to his starting position, what was left of the cognitive functions of the group had been extinguished. A crudely
efficient mass lateral craniotomy was performed with breathless ease.

  It was as though they all had their marionette strings cut at the same time. The zombies dropped like dominos around the man. He shook the end of the weapon to remove the cling-ons, regarded his handiwork, and then stepped over the dead-dead bodies towards a dumbfounded Francis.

  Nathan, who had watched the massacre through the railings, looked up at Francis with a faceful of queries. “Wh—”

  Francis raised a hand. “No questions, Nate. None. Let’s go see who this is. If things go bad, remember the doors are below us. Just run, okay? Follow me this time.” He glared at the child who swallowed his inquisitiveness for now and shadowed him down the stairs.

  The staff was slung over the man’s back and held in place by a leather strap across his chest. He dusted his hands together and walked towards the man and boy. “No shit. It can’t be, can it?” he chuckled.

  Francis stopped at the bottom of the stairs, shielding Nathan, who peeked from behind his protector’s legs. “Do I know you, slim?” he asked cautiously.

  The figure continued on his path. Calloused hands reached up and pulled the hood down. “Alright Cissy.”

  Chapter Eight

  The fire crackled and spat, the wet wood resisting immolation as long as it could. Francis looked across at the now de-robed man and smiled. “Philip, so, how you been? Your brother okay? Did you find your folks? What are you doing here?”

  Nathan looked up from his charred rat on a stick. “You ask lots of questions, Francis,” he said between smirking and chewing.

  “We got to our parents, but it was too late. Mum’s dead and Dad, well, let’s say he’s on a tour of the culinary delights of those still breathing. Kinda why I’m out here to be honest.” Philip peeled strands of meat off the flash-cooked rodent.