Killing The Dead | Book 21 | The Journey Home

by Murray, Richard

  “Like what?”

  “Stop them!”

  I gave him an irritated glance, not quite sure what he was expecting from me. To stop them I would need to either reveal myself or kill them and if they were members of my cult, they were not bad people, so I would be breaking my promise to Lily. Again.

  “How has your Lord Death been reborn?” I asked, surprising myself, as all eyes turned to me.

  “He died when the fire fell from heaven, obliterating the enemies of the Living!” the leader declared, quite loudly. “More than five years ago.”

  “And he’s been reborn?” I couldn’t help my grin. “Some kid out there somewhere the reincarnation of him?”

  “Do you mock us?”

  “No,” I lied. “Just curious.”

  “Our Holy Leader believed that his power was transferred to his children,” the leader said. “But that is not the case.”

  “How do you know?” I narrowed my gaze at mention of my children.

  “Our Holy Leader tested them each day, as their training began.”

  “Who the hell is this holy person?” Gregg asked. “What makes you think they aren’t your new leader?”

  “A great beast was slain,” the cultist said, voice full of something close to awe. “One that only our Lord Death could have slain for no other possesses the ability.”

  “Great beast?” I wondered and felt a tug on my arm as Gregg sought my attention.

  “The Parasite, maybe?”

  “Are you talking about the parasite in London?”

  “Yes, you know of this?” The leader of the small group took an eager step forward and I realised I had made a mistake. “Speak now or we shall make you.”

  “Heard from a traveller,” I lied. “They came through here a few weeks ago.”

  Alice cocked an eyebrow at that, but when she didn’t correct me, the other villagers followed her lead.

  “You will tell us of this traveller,” the cultist said, drawing his knife. “And then you shall all kneel and pledge your faith to our Lord Death.”

  “If we don’t?” I asked, more than a little confused by the man’s behaviour.

  “We shall test you and those found wanting will be returned to the eternal night.”

  So, tortured until we either died or agreed that his messiah was better than any of the others. That would have been less amusing if I wasn’t the messiah he wanted me to pledge my loyalty to.

  “What happened to the kids?” Gregg asked, before I could reply.

  “They are with their mother.”

  Lily.

  “Didn’t she object to you training her kids, or is she one of your faithful?” Alice asked, smiling coyly as her eyes flicked to mine.

  “She was made to understand,” the cultist said, and my eyes snapped to him. “Our Holy Leader, Sebastian, ensured she bent the knee and served the faith. As shall you-“

  His eyes widened behind his mask as my knife slammed into his stomach, and I blinked, not even aware that I had moved. Silence filled the air around us until I twisted the knife in that man’s guts, and he screamed.

  The world burst into movement and my axe was in my hand. I pulled back my arm and threw it forward, the axe crashing into the skull of the second cultist as I engaged the third. Her knife was out, and she moved well, slashing as she spun to her left.

  I caught her blade on my own and pirouetted, right leg rising as I kicked out at her. She caught the kick on her arm with barely a grunt and leapt back, scanning the crowd, and assessing the danger. They didn’t move, so she focused her attention on me alone.

  A quick flurry of blows, right, left then right again before I leapt in, left knee rising to catch her in the side. Her fist glanced off of my shoulder as I spun and twisted around her. Blood spilt onto the ground as she yelped and I stepped back, watching her.

  “You’re decent, but nowhere near good enough to beat me,” I said. She stared back defiantly, ignoring the bleeding cut on her arm. “Are Lilly and the children still alive?”

  “Yes,” the answer came before she realised, and I could almost see her clamping her lips shut behind the mask. “How do you know that name?”

  “Who is Sebastian and what happened to Samuel?” I asked, ignoring her question.

  Her eyes showed her confusion and she said, “Sebastian leads us. Samuel lost his way.”

  Whatever that meant. I caught Alice’s look of surprise that was slowly fading and realised I didn’t have much time.

  “Where is Sebastian?”

  “I will not tell you that.”

  “Then you’re no use to me.”

  “No!” Alice snapped as I stepped forward. “Do not kill her! My Lord Death, please!”

  A moment’s pause, that is all that was needed as Daniel raised his spear and clubbed the cultist in the back of the head with it. Her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed as I tilted my head and looked directly at my former follower.

  “Why?”

  “There was no need to kill them!”

  “I disagree.”

  “You would!”

  “They brought harm of some kind to my family. That will not go unpunished.”

  “That is not your decision to make!”

  The crowd were watching us intently and I realised that I had made a grievous error. I should not have attacked the cultists but when they spoke of my family….

  Well, too late to put that particular genie back in the bottle, so all I could do was shrug my shoulders and retrieve my axe. The first cultist I had stabbed was staring up at me with eyes that were wide with pain and fear.

  “Guess you heard that, huh?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “What did Sebastian do to my family?”

  “M-my Lord D-death, I beg y-your-“

  “I care nothing for what you beg. Answer my question.”

  “H-he took your children, a-and imprisoned your wife.”

  Not my wife, but a minor point.

  “Did he harm them?”

  “He b-believed they were t-t-the two forces reborn. He w-would not harm them.”

  “And Lily?”

  The young man squeezed his eyes shut tight as he moaned. Tears filled them as he reopened them and he looked up at me, anguish filling them.

  “W-we thought she h-had to die, so the forces could find r-rebirth.”

  “Yet she lives?”

  If she did not, I would burn the world to ash if that was what it took to find this Sebastian.

  “Y-yes.”

  “How?”

  “S-Samuel, stole away your children. She was to hang, l-like all who b-betrayed us.”

  I knelt beside him, well aware of the spreading pool of blood beneath him and the absolute silence of the watching crowd. It may well be that I would need to kill all of them too.

  “She did not hang?”

  “N-no, my Lord Death, I swear!” he wept openly, though from pain or his betrayal of me, I could not tell. “A-as she hanged, word came that a p-parasite had been slain.”

  I wasn’t entirely certain of why that mattered, but I wasn’t in the mood to question it too much. She was alive.

  “Where is Sebastian now?”

  “N-north,” the youth said. “W-Windermere, where you had made your home once.”

  Then Lily was safe. It was enough.

  “You betrayed your vow,” I said, voice soft. “There can be only one punishment. Do you accept this?”

  He squeezed shut his eyes, the tears running down his cheeks. “Yes.”

  Without another word, I raised my axe above my head and brought it crashing back down in one swift movement. The youth died and was spared returning as a zombie.

  I looked up, meeting the gaze of Alice and I smiled as I said, “we should talk.”

  Chapter 15

  “She’ll be fine, though will likely have a headache.” Abigail wiped her hands with the cloth and began to gather her medical kit as she gave me a stern look. “What the hell happened?”


  “Good question,” Gregg said. “I’ll fill you in later.”

  “I would rather have answers now.” Alice, arms crossed before her, scowled at me as she waited beside the door. “Care to explain?”

  “Not really.” I turned back to my friend. “Gather our belongings, we need to leave now.”

  “You’re not going anywhere!”

  I forced back a sigh and looked over at the former cult member. I owed her nothing, but if she went to the radio and even suggested that I was still alive, we would have a lot of trouble headed our way.

  “Forget what you heard,” I said, voice low and cold. “Then forget we were ever here.”

  “Not good enough! What is going on?”

  Gregg met my gaze with his own and his shoulders lifted in a small shrug. No help there then. I gave him a nod and he brushed past me as he left the room and back to the house we had left our belongings in.

  “You want answers, fine, I’ll tell you what I can. Five years ago, I found the location of an underground bunker that belonged to the people who created the zombie plague. I went there and killed them all. Unfortunately, they had fired a nuclear device at the island where my family were, and the only way to stop it was to redirect it, right to where I was.”

  “Why there?”

  “Only coordinates we had and very limited time. Plus, it set off a self-defence measure that ensured more nuclear weapons were fired off at any and all other bases belonging to that group.”

  “How did you survive?”

  “We were on one of the lower floors. The top ten collapsed but ours didn’t. We have spent five years living underground and finally found our way out. We were travelling north to head back home when we came here.”

  She was silent a moment as she digested that. She didn’t seem to doubt my words, but she did need to mull on them to let them sink in.

  “We have a radio, why didn’t you ask to contact your island?”

  “Because we had heard that a year or so ago, they had gone silent. Stopped responding and helping people. I needed to know who I would be contacting before I could try.”

  “You know she is safe now,” Alice said, watching me intently. “Yet still you have not asked to contact her.”

  “Any mention of me will, apparently, bring my cult members running. Since I have no intention of dealing with them until I need to, I would rather avoid that.”

  “They are your cult, why would you avoid them?”

  I glanced over at where Abigail was doing her best to pretend not to be listening and I let out a grunt of laughter as I shook my head.

  “My family has moved on,” I said, feeling an unexpected pain at the thought. “I have no intention of ever returning to them. All I would do is bring pain and misery to their door.”

  Abigail did look up then, and I met her gaze squarely.

  “Why head north at all then?”

  “We have something that can help people,” I said, not looking away from the young medic. “A means to stop people becoming zombies, but the only ones with the ability to mass produce it are on the island. I will get Abigail as close as possible and then she will take it across.”

  “Not you, or your friend?”

  “No.” I could see the betrayal and hurt in Abigail’s eyes and I knew that I needed her to understand before I had to have that awkward conversation with Gregg. “Too many questions if either of us returns. It has to be her, and her alone.”

  “She has the medical knowledge to explain it, and the history to back up where it came from. You’ve seen these cultists. If I return, they will come back to the island and I can’t have them harming my family.”

  “Noble,” Alice said. “But they are out here, walking from place to place as they look for survivors. How many will be hurt or killed as they try to convert them?”

  “I will deal with them.”

  “How?”

  “For one, I will kill their leader and then I will hunt down the rest.”

  “While many more innocent people die!”

  There was a definite tone to her voice that I did not like, and I finally turned back to her sneering face and lifted my hands out to either side of me.

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Follow your own rules!” She snapped. “Do as you promised, all those years ago and protect the people who need it.”

  “I will do that, but I am only one man. There are limits to how fast I can move.”

  “Find a way!”

  She wiped at the tears that filled her eyes and I wondered for a moment what had brought them on. Not that it mattered. She was asking the impossible and from what we had learnt since leaving the bunker, it seemed that there were raider groups everywhere.

  It was still going to take months to travel the length and breadth of the country and it was entirely likely we would need to fight our way across a good portion of it. Despite what my idiotic cult members thought, I was just a man.

  “We need to leave,” I said. “If you have any sense you will make sure that no one speaks of who we are or that we were ever here. If you do, it will only bring danger to you.”

  Alice took a step forward, hand reaching out to touch my arm. I tilted my head as I looked quizzically at her, wondering what she wanted.

  “Please,” she whispered. “My Lord Death, for the service I gave you. Please, find a way to help stop the killing.”

  Hardly a selling point since she had abandoned my service, but I nodded anyway with a heavy sigh for I knew that she would keep on until I agreed.

  “Promise me.”

  Bitch! That made it more awkward as I really did not like to break my promises. Which is why they were so rarely given.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “I promise to try and bring order to this country.”

  No matter how many people I needed to kill to do it.

  “The Riders-“

  “I have no time for them!”

  “They will be coming and if you are gone, they will punish us.”

  “I cannot wait.”

  “Leave the village by the west road and turn right onto Lower End. Follow that road until you have crossed the River Great Ouse, then turn right again onto the A422 and travel north.” She hesitated a moment as she closed her eyes. “Follow that road and you will likely come upon them as they travel south towards us.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll get the location of this leader of theirs and go kill him for you.”

  “That is the only way, God help us.”

  “I doubt he cares to try, but I will,” I said with a mocking grin as I pulled my arm away from her hand. “Supplies for the road would be appreciated and I need a new coat.”

  “We shall arrange it.” Another pause as she glanced at the unconscious cultist. “What of…”

  “She will either have to come with us or I kill her here and now,” I said. “If I leave her behind, you’ll have to kill her.”

  “You promise not to harm her if she goes with you?”

  “I can promise to try not to,” I agreed. “But that’s the best you will get.”

  She gave me a hard stare that lasted long enough to be uncomfortable before giving a sharp nod and spinning on her heel. She marched out of the room and I let out another sigh before turning back to Abagail.

  “Wake her up and get her ready to move. We’ve a long walk ahead of us.”

  ****

  An hour later we were out of the village and following the narrow country road. A light rain had begun to fall, and I lifted the hood of my new coat as I kept a wary eye on the young cultist walking along ahead of me.

  Her hands bound, and with all weapons that had been secreted upon her person removed, she wore a sullen expression on a face that bore too many lines and scars. Her journey through the apocalypse had taken a toll, that was clear, even to me.

  Gregg walked beside her, his mood more sombre than usual and I knew he had questions but none that I was interested in answering just the
n. It was all I could do to ignore the burning stare of Abigail on the back of my neck.

  She had plenty of questions too and I was fairly certain that as soon as she could find a moment alone with me, she would be quite vocal about asking them.

  On the whole, my companions were a miserable bunch, but as we walked along, I found myself humming a merry tune. I’d got to kill two people and that made me a happy killer indeed. It didn’t make up for not being able to finish off the Genpact people, but it was a start.

  Plus, there was danger headed towards us and two enemies that I needed to crush utterly. Both of whom would have a small army around them. It was going to be a lot of fun for me.

  The silence continued until the sun began to make its way down towards the horizon and I decided it was time to make camp for the night. I had no intention of running into the raiders accidently in the dark.

  Just before the bridge that crossed the River Great Ouse, we found a likely place. The grime covered sign at the entrance of the long, narrow driveway, declared it to be Thornton College. A girls boarding school and sixth form college.

  The trees that bordered it provided a protective screen and the campus itself, a sprawling multi-storey building of yellow stone and grey slate, would have ample room for us. Sitting opposite the main building, within the college grounds, was a chapel and behind the main building were the various sports facilities and courts.

  I led our group up the path to the front entrance and stood on the cracked tarmac, staring at the college for a short time. It had certainly seen better days.

  A fire had gutted a good portion of it and what remained had shattered windows and the all too familiar stains left behind as the undead rampaged through the place. Even after so many years, those stains remained, a reminder of the deaths that had been wrought there.

  “We can’t stay in there,” Gregg muttered.

  “No,” I agreed. “What survived the fire is clearly going to have been affected by years of weather and neglect. Let’s try the chapel.”

  That was by far the better option. A single storey rectangular building that appeared intact. On the front, was a three-storey tower with crenelated roof with a flag post atop that had long since lost the flag.