‘You alright, girl?’ she mumbled to Star, once she got to the cart; patting the mare’s flank and running her hand across her back. ‘You’re not bothered at all, are you… heh?’ she continued to mutter, glancing around for Tom, while Star, ignoring her presence, idly munched away at the tall grass.
It was then that she spotted him, partly hidden by a huge rhododendron bush, facing away from her and standing motionless in the far corner of the front garden. Worryingly, as she stepped round the three and a half headless corpses in her path, she noticed Tom still held both of his curved blades in his hands and for a moment she wondered if he was waiting for more of the Dead to come charging though the bush in front of him. So tightening her grip on the machete in her hand, Fran moved forward; wary that the Dead could appear at any moment.
‘Tom?’ she softly called, barely sparing a glance at the upturned and decapitated head of a Dead man; its filmy eyes following her hungrily. ‘Tom what…’
It was then that she noticed the low rumble of Tom’s voice; he was talking to himself again, the spectres of his lost family having claimed him once more. She knew these ghosts were as real to him as she was, perhaps even more so. So with the realisation that Tom was only partly there in the corpse strewn garden with her, his mind temporarily lost to his psychosis, she slowed her approach.
‘Tom?’ she called again, her tone full of concern, as if talking to a small child. ‘Tom, are you alright?’
Instantly his mumbled conversation stopped, his neck muscles suddenly tensing as he became aware of her presence.
‘Tom?’ she repeated, instinctively taking a small step back; wary of his strange behaviour.
Slowly Tom started to turn to look at her; his gore splattered face contorted in disgust, his lips moving once more in mute conversation.
‘Yes, I know,’ he suddenly growled, replying to some statement only his fractured mind could hear.
‘Tom!’ warned Fran, adding strength to the word, hoping he could see her for what she was and not some monster conjured up by his mania. ‘Tom, it’s me!’
But her words went unheard and unregistered. For with an animalistic grunt, Tom suddenly broke into a sprint, charging across the garden towards her; his face a mask of intense rage, his gore covered blades held aloft.
‘Oh, Shit!’ she spat, her mind racing for a way to separate Tom from his wickedly sharp weapons; knowing only then would she have a fighting chance to take him down without either of them suffering permanent injury.
***
‘Kill it!’ hissed his wife, her voice whispering from the shadowy corners of his mind. ‘Rip it to shreds, Tom! Rip it limb from limb… just like they tore apart our babies, our two beautiful daughters.’
‘Yes,’ sneered Tom, his eyes burning with hatred as he bolted back through the tall grass to destroy the lone cadaver that had somehow snuck up behind him; even now mocking his grief with its very presence.
As the cadaver loomed closer, his mind vaguely noticed that the corpse had been a young woman in life and despite the decay and terrible wounds she had suffered, he could almost make out the woman she once was. There was something distantly familiar about the image he fleetingly saw flashing across the pale and drawn features; like a strangely distorted reflection or glimpse of a memory. Yet each time his shattered mind fought to grab hold and make sense of what was in front of him it twisted and turned, slipping out from his grasp until only the hungry corpse remained once more.
‘There was so much pain, Daddy,’ whispered his eldest daughter, her words like an icy breath in his ear, ‘when they bit me… when they ripped me open.’
‘I know, baby, I know,’ said Tom, his anger and grief consuming him; chasing away any last vestige of humanity the Dead woman’s corpse still held. ‘Daddy will make them pay… all of them.’
And with that the young woman’s cadaver was suddenly standing in front of him; his blades slicing through the air to rid the earth of its hellish existence. Yet even through his rage-muddled thoughts, Tom could tell something was wrong; something was very different about this corpse. Gone was the cadaver’s single minded purpose to reach him, gone were the slow torturous movements as it forced its decaying muscles into action and, perhaps what alarmed him the most, gone was the flame of unending hunger from its film covered eyes. But the path of Tom’s actions had been set and as the blade in his right hand slashed forward, there was nothing he could do to change its course, even if he wanted to. Then, as if to torment him further, the Dead woman’s body suddenly dropped to one knee, an arm shooting outward as his blade skimmed harmlessly past the top of its head; and then without warning, Tom’s world exploded in a world of pain radiating from his groin.
***
‘Tom!’ Fran suddenly shouted, using his own momentum against him to throw him to the ground beside her; just in case the crippling pain from her blow hadn’t been enough to snap him back to reality.
But thankfully, as she had hoped, the single well-aimed punch between Tom’s legs had sent a lightning bolt of pain through his addled mind; shocking him back to a mental reset position.
‘Arrughh!’ Tom cried, dropping to the ground; the blades falling from his hands so he could instinctively cup his screaming testicles as he curled up into a ball. ‘Jesus… Fucking Christ!’ he groaned once he was finally able to speak again; still clutching his groin. ‘Arrughh! My fucking bollocks, Fran! What… the… fuck!’
‘Oh, thank God!’ she exclaimed, slipping her machete back on the loop on her belt; her hands still shaking. ‘Christ, Tom! I… I thought we’d lost you… I thought…’
‘What?’ Tom groaned, only half hearing what she was saying; his forehead pressed to the ground as he rocked back and forth, willing the gut-wrenching pain to subside.
‘Tom, you… you couldn’t see me,’ she replied. ‘You were gone… you were somewhere else.’
As soon as her words filtered through his agony Tom stopped rocking and turned his face to look at her; his face clouded with remorse and shame.
‘Go back inside,’ he said through gritted teeth; his tone flat and unreadable.
‘Tom, I...’ she started to interject, her hand hovering over his back; unsure if she should help him up.
‘Fran… please,’ he continued, closing his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to see the look on her face. ‘Please… just go back in with the others… I’ll… I’ll follow in a minute. Okay?’
For a moment Fran simply knelt there, silent; her concerned gaze searching his face for some sign that he would be alright.
‘Okay,’ she slowly replied, the single word drenched with sorrow and guilt.
But as Fran pushed herself up she realised it would never be alright, not for Tom, not really. She knew the day would come when his mind broke beyond repair, trapping him in the prison of his own conjured nightmare; and worst of all, she knew that in that instant, he knew it too.
‘Christ… we’re losing him, we’re really losing him,’ she thought to herself, tears stinging her eyes as she made her way back to the kitchen; Bob once again happily following at her heels.
Steeling a final glance behind her as she stood in the open doorway, she saw Tom gingerly pushing himself to his feet.
‘Fight them, Tom,’ she silently urged, ‘don’t let them take your sanity. Don’t let it slip through your fingers so easily... fight for it… please, fight for it!’
Yet even as she willed him to battle against his demons, she knew it was pointless. For Tom knew these demons, these spectres from another realm; and in truth he welcomed their presence and their unearthly calls for revenge. In life he had known them totally. The curve of their cheeks, the glint of their eyes, the soft touch of their lips; he had known each phrase, each look and each emotion written in their faces. They were his life, his loves, his reason for being and with them gone he was forced to live a tortuous half-life existence; a mere shadow of his full and former self.
***
‘Well, we were planning o
n going… this way,’ said Mike, tracing a line with his finger across the large map laid flat on the marble counter top between them. ‘But now…’
‘Now we have to find another way,’ muttered Fran, studying the map for an alternative route, while beside her Kai thumbed his way through a smaller more localised book of roadmaps for the area.
‘Why?’ asked Tom, stepping into the kitchen and walking up to the counter, purposefully avoiding Fran’s fleeting look of concern.
‘The A39,’ said Sam, stabbing at a point on the map, ‘it cuts right through here,’ she continued, shifting the position of the gurgling baby in her arms to run her finger across the map in a slashing motion, ‘and we need to cross it to get to… here… White Oak Park’s on the other side.’
‘That motorway leads to Truro,’ noticed Tom, looking from Sam to Mike. ‘That’s a sizable town. Any route in or out will be choked, gridlocked with vehicles from years back... not to mention all the Dead probably still milling around the area… just how were you two planning on crossing it before you met us?’
‘An overpass,’ said Mike, his gaze briefly flitting over Tom’s freshly gore splattered clothes. ‘They’re every four or five miles round here. They’re meant for bicycle or foot traffic and most of them are ramp access, so we would’ve had no trouble getting across with Betsey.’
‘But they’re too narrow for Star and the cart,’ stated Tom, realising what Mike was saying.
‘Exactly,’ Mike agreed, looking from Tom to Fran, who was staring intently at the map, her head in her hands as if hoping a solution would magically jump out at her.
For the next few minutes they each silently studied the map before them; each of them coming up with a new route only to then dismiss it again when it inevitably at some point became bisected by the troublesome motorway.
‘Any chance Star could move enough of the wreckage so we could pass,’ suggested Sam, looking hopefully across the counter at Tom.
‘Doubt it,’ replied Tom, with a shake of his head, ‘and anyway, it’ll be crawling with the Dead… it’s too risky we’ll just…’
‘W…wait a minute!’ Kai suddenly exclaimed, his eyes flicking back and forth between a page in his smaller book of roadmaps and what he saw on the large map in front of them. ‘Yes, l…look,’ he continued, briefly cracking the spine of the book so it would lie flat before placing it open on the counter. ‘This r…road here,’ he continued, tracing a line down passed a village called Carnon Downs to a large roundabout where it joined the motorway.
‘Sorry, am I missing something?’ asked Mike, clearly oblivious to some vital detail Kai had noticed.
‘This caravan p…park,’ he went on to clarify, his finger stabbing to an area just off the exit on the other side of the roundabout. ‘On the large m…map it’s a closed off space, a dead end… see, it’s surrounded b…by fields and w…woodland,’ he continued, making sure each of them saw the area he meant, ‘b…but in the b…book.’
‘Damn, you’re right… What is that? Some sort of access road or something?’ asked Tom, realising there was indeed a difference between the two maps; the one in the book showing what looked to be some sort of driveway from the back of the caravan park that ran parallel to the motorway; finally re-joining the road system proper just on the outskirts of another smaller collection of buildings marked down as Lanyew Farms.
‘Yes… and then if we take this road down to here,’ said Mike, suddenly all animated, his eyes sparkling with excitement, ‘it take us to here… and then down to here, to the Trelissick Gallery and gardens.’
‘So?’ asked Fran, noticing the point he had indicated, though very close the White Oak Park, was in fact on the wrong side of a wide river; a river with no obvious crossing.
‘So… I’ve been there before,’ he replied, a wide grin slowly spreading over his face. ‘Back then there was a proper ferry that went back and forth taking cars and passengers… but that’ll be useless to us now. No, what I remember is what a laugh me and my mates had when we went across the river.’
Tom looked at Mike, his expression urging him to finish his point.
‘Well, instead of the ferry there was this old fashioned wide barge thing,’ he said, his hands moving as if forming shapes in the air to show them what he meant, ‘and we pulled ourselves across on guide ropes.’
‘This barge, wide enough for a horse and cart?’ asked Tom, the look on Mike’s face already giving him his answer.
‘Oh, yes,’ smiled Mike, suddenly remembering the two young women who had flashed him and his friends a set of dazzling smiles, saying they couldn’t help pull it across because they’d just had their nails done, ‘absolutely!’
***
‘Carnon Downs Caravan Park coming up on the right,’ whispered Tom later that afternoon, nodding to the next turning on the small roundabout just ahead of them; its central island now a riot of overgrown greenery slowly claiming the crumpled remains of an upturned car.
‘Just as well we didn’t need the next exit,’ mumbled Fran, looking despondently at the trail of rusting, burned out and abandoned vehicles winding off into the distance; their doors and shattered windows streaked with the deep brown of long forgotten bloody carnage. ‘Jesus!’
‘The poor bastards,’ whispered Mike, noticing the hundreds of slowly moving corpses still dotted amongst the wreckage; his soft voice hushed with reverence, as if afraid their very survival was an affront to the thousands that had lost their lives in this single traffic jam from Hell, ‘they didn’t stand a chance.’
‘That’s panic for you,’ muttered Tom, looking back at Mike and remembering with a shudder how only his knowledge of the warren-like side roads had saved him from the nightmare that the major streets of London had quickly devolved into. ‘All it takes is one arsehole to lose it and in an instant he’s signed the death warrants for every unlucky sod driving behind him.’
Fortunately, with the turning they needed appearing to lead to nowhere but an enclosed caravan park, apart from a single wrecked car with the twisted remains of a motorbike lodged under its wheels, this was the one part of the roundabout relatively free of debris.
‘And there’s enough room for us to get past?’ asked Fran, tracking the corpse of a young Dead black woman about to shamble past Star; its burnt and matted weave hanging loosely from what was left of the creature’s natural scalp.
‘Erm…’ Tom replied, his voice slightly distant as he too followed the Dead woman’s slow and tortuous progress across their path, ‘I...’
‘Tom,’ prompted Fran, noticing the way he seemed transfixed by the swing of the cadaver’s torn and shredded arms; their continued attachment as precarious as the Dead woman’s fake hair.
‘What… erm…I… I can’t really tell for sure, not from this angle,’ he whispered, at last tearing his eyes from the ruined corpse to give Star’s reins a single sharp flick, urging her onward again. ‘But yeah… yeah, I think we should be okay.’
As it turned out, there was indeed just enough room for them to get by and as Star slowly pulled them past the mess of mangled metal littering the road, all they had to contend with was the jolt of one of the wheels bumping up and over the roadside curb and they were home free.
‘Phew! That was a stroke of luck,’ puffed Mike, releasing the anxious breath he had been holding as Tom manoeuvred Star to take the exit that was in fact little more than the driveway leading to the caravan park.
‘Don’t count your chickens, just yet,’ mumbled Tom, curiously leaning forward to look at something a little further down the driveway. ‘In my experience,’ he continued, only half listening to Mike’s conversation behind him, ‘luck has a way of buggering off and leaving you in the shit… just when you need it most.’
‘Tom?’ asked Fran, knowing something had caught his eye; something she feared was about to become a problem.
‘Crap!’ he suddenly sighed, pulling Star to an abrupt halt to turn and to look at his fellow travelling companions. ‘We
ll… welcome to Shit City, people... Population, us!’
***
With a grunt, Fran swung the heavy bolt cutters, smashing them into the skull of the Dead child in front of her. But no sooner had the unfortunate creature crumpled to the ground under the force of her blow than she felt the cold touch of yet more cadaverous fingers grasping at her.
‘Shit!’ she spat, frantically kicking the corpse of a Dead man away from her, the dark ragged wound at its throat causing the head to loll sickeningly to one side.
With the sound of brittle ribs snapping barely audible over the ghoulish moaning of the Dead, she watched as the Dead man’s body flew backwards, colliding with the other corpses behind it and bringing all three of them to the ground in a heap of tattered rags and rotting flesh. But even with these cadavers momentarily out of action, struggling to right themselves, Fran knew she had only bought herself a few precious seconds and even as she turned to kick out at the caravan door behind her, she saw yet more of the Dead were already closing in.
Within the whispered safety of the cart, it had seemed like such a simple plan. Cut the chain securing the gates, dart in ahead of Star, make her way silently among the caravans and re-join the cart only when she was sure she could do so unobserved by the Dead. Of course as with all the best plans it had lasted a full twenty seconds before falling apart in the most spectacular fashion; leaving her running for her life with hungry corpses seemingly lurking around every corner.
She got her first clue that everything wasn’t about to go as planned as she darted down the gap between two caravans and the corpse of a Dead woman lurched at her through a partially open window; its withered fingers clawing unexpectedly and painfully across her cheek. Thankful that the window had restricted the creature’s reach and saved her from losing an eye, she angrily batted aside the offending limb before exploding out between the two caravans and onto a gravel pathway choked with weeds and tall grasses. Yet no sooner had she escaped the clutches of one corpse than she immediately found herself the focus of six more; each of them fixing her with a glare of hungry determination. Without even breaking her stride Fran bolted onward, pushing aside the corpse of an obese Dead man dressed only in a pair of filthy shorts, his sagging skin tearing and splitting under its own rotten weight, and darted for the gap between the two caravans opposite her.
Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead Page 16
