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

by Stephen Charlick

  ‘Yes, yes, of course… we don’t want to keep Dennis waiting,’ said Fran, plastering a smile across her face in an attempt to calm the fragile woman. ‘Kai,’ she continued, calling behind her, ‘Natalie’s here, time to… ’

  She was about to say more when the air around them was suddenly filled with the sound of countless beating wings and the deafening chorus of chattering bird song.

  ‘What the?’ she began to ask, just as a huge flock of dazzling starlings sped past the branches of the huge beech their tree house had been built around.

  For a moment, as if sensing that she was watching their display, the flock doubled back on itself; the undulating movement of so many small bodies appearing to move as one fluid and organic organism. She watched the flock twisting and morphing into one shape only for them to change direction and create a new moving silhouette once more. And then as fast as they had appeared, they were gone again; disappearing up and over the tree canopy leaving nothing in their wake but a soft breeze that carried the scent of warm feathers and a clear autumn sky.

  ‘Wow,’ whispered Fran, watching as a final starling darted past, eager to catch up with the rest of its flock.

  ‘They do it every evening,’ mumbled Natalie. ‘It gives us…’

  Whatever she was about to say was abruptly cut short by the sound of a male voice shouting from below them.

  ‘Hey! Hey, Nat!’ the voice called up to her from the forest floor some five metres below them. ‘Which way?’

  Stepping over to the rail that ran the perimeter of the tree house, Natalie gingerly looked down to find a man in his mid-twenties with short brown hair looking up at her; an orange mountain bike between his legs and a folded up bundle firmly lodged under one arm.

  ‘Which way they go?’ he panted, taking a moment to gulp down some apparently much needed air.

  ‘That way,’ replied Natalie, pointing in the direction the flock had flown.

  And with that he was off again, cycling in swift pursuit along the cobbled pathway winding through the forest below them. That was until he suddenly skidded to a halt, leapt off the bike and disappeared into the dense surrounding woodland; the spinning front wheel on the abandoned bicycle the only sign he had been there at all.

  ‘He was chasing the flock, right?’ asked Fran, just as Kai stepped through the doorway, zipping up a hooded top over his thin Batman t-shirt.

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Natalie, already starting to cross the decking towards the rope bridge that connected their tree house to the one next to it, some twenty metres away, ‘the others can’t get the hang of the net but Ben, he’s really got a knack with it.’

  ‘He catches the b…birds with it?’ said Kai, slipping his hand in Fran’s as they followed the young woman onto the rope bridge leading to the tree house Sam and Mike had been given to stay in. ‘How?’

  ‘He climbs a tree next to the one the flock chooses to roost in and then throws the net across the gap,’ she clarified, sounding a little bemused why he would want to know.

  ‘And does he catch many?’ asked Fran, wondering just how much meat was on a starling.

  ‘Enough,’ she replied, her eyes nervously flicking towards the remnants of the setting sun; the last of its dwindling orange light only just managing to filter through the canopy around them. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, increasing her pace along the rope bridge, ‘a lot of what he catches goes straight in the smoke house… you… you’d be surprised how quickly it builds up.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fran, glancing at Kai, ‘I think I would.’

  Walking the rest of the rope bridge in silence, only the sound of the wooden boards creaking under their weight to accompany them, a thought suddenly stuck Fran, causing her to glance back the way they had come.

  ‘What?’ said the unspoken yet questioning look on Kai’s face.

  ‘Oh, I was just wondering,’ she whispered, noticing from the very slight falter in Natalie’s hurried steps that she was listening, ‘if before the Dead came whether the tree houses were accessible from ground level or just had these walkways… I mean you would have thought people wanted their privacy, not all and sundry traipsing past their front door whenever they felt like it.’

  ‘Not all of the tree houses were connected when we first got here…’ offered Natalie, without looking back. ‘Dennis and the others, they had to build some of the walkways themselves and then they removed the stairs to each tree house… so now there’s only one flight down and that’s been turned into a sort of drawbridge that we pull up each night.’

  ‘Handy,’ commented Fran, ‘bit of a pain to walk all that way back every time you want to go down though.’

  ‘Why would you want to?’ asked Natalie, looking back at Fran; the look on her face a clear indication that she thought the idea that anyone would choose to leave the safety of their elevated habitat quite unfathomable.

  ‘But… but you do go down… sometimes?’ said Fran, wondering if the young woman had developed a strange type of limited agoraphobia to the world beyond the warren of tree houses. ‘I mean you don’t stay up here all the time?’

  ‘No… I,’ she replied, a haunted look flitting across her eyes as unwelcome memories rose to the surface of her mind, ‘I have to work the gardens in the dome, the old swimming complex… it’s… it’s alright once I’m inside but…’

  ‘But you have to get there first,’ suggested Fran, realising this traumatised canary simply exchanged one gilded cage for another and the transition between them must be truly terrifying for her.

  ‘Yes,’ Natalie simply stated, her eyes becoming glassy and unfocused as the triggered memory played itself out to fruition.

  ‘Natalie,’ said Fran, reaching out to touch the woman frozen by images of her own past, ‘Natalie, are you okay?’

  But the moment her fingers brushed against her, Natalie visibly jumped; startled from her dreamlike state.

  ‘What? Sorry, I…’ she began, momentarily a little dazed and unsure by the jolt back to reality.

  ‘Natalie, are you…’ Fran started to ask, shooting a concerned glance to Kai.

  ‘I… I’m fine… I’m fine… really,’ Natalie replied, unable to meet Fran’s gaze as she toyed nervously with a button on her cardigan. ‘Erm… we… we need to hurry, the others will be waiting.’

  Without waiting for either Fran or Kai to say anything else, Natalie abruptly turned away from her and was on the move again; the brief mental lapse into her past seeming to add urgency to her footsteps.

  ‘What about Sam and Mike?’ asked Fran, slowing down as they stepped off the rope bridge and onto the decking surrounding the tree house the other couple had been given.

  ‘Oh, Wendy collected them earlier,’ said Natalie, barely sparing the tree house a glance as she walked past and made her way onto the next strung walkway. ‘She was helping to feed the baby in the Hub when Dennis told me to come and get you.’

  ‘The Hub?’ said Kai, unsure what the throwaway comment had meant.

  ‘Oh, it’s the tree house in the centre, we all use it,’ she confirmed, ‘you know for meals, meetings… that sort of thing.’

  As Natalie strode ahead of them, confident in the knowledge that Fran and Kai would follow, Fran glanced back the way they had come; a niggling thought forming.

  ‘Natalie… do you know where Tom is?’ she asked, as casually as she could. ‘I mean in the Park, which tree house is he staying in?’

  ‘Oh… he’s…. he’s in one of the empty ones on the far side of the Hub from here,’ she replied, waving a hand off to her right, ‘a few tree houses down from Wendy and Emma, I think.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Fran mumbled in reply, the snippet of information just confirming what she had already suspected, that for some reason they had been separated; But why?

  ***

  ‘You’ve got a one track mind, Brett Nash… honestly!’ giggled Norma, just as Natalie led Fran and Kai through the front door of the tree house nicknamed the Hub; the girlish action appearing so
mewhat at odds coming from the woman clearly in her fifties. ‘You’re as bad as that brother of yours.’

  ‘Didn’t hear you complaining last night, Norma?’ chuckled Grant, winking at the woman currently sat astride his brother.

  At the other end of the table, visibly bored by the whole conversation sat Dennis and Emma. Next to them, Wendy fawned over a happily gurgling Poppy while beside her both Tom and the child’s parents had been seemingly forgotten and ignored for the moment. The only person in the room that Fran hadn’t already been introduced to was a grey haired man in his early fifties. He was sat half way down the table with his head down, lost in his thoughts as he idly played with a fork.

  ‘You know I…’Norma started to say, just as she noticed Fran and Kai standing behind Natalie in the doorway.

  It didn’t take a genius to see what relationship the older woman had carved out for herself with the two brothers and as she looked Fran up and down, perhaps gauging how much of a threat the younger and more attractive female posed, Fran realised she had been absolutely correct in her assumptions. For no sooner had Norma noticed that Kai was holding Fran’s hand, essentially staking his claim on her, then the disapproving and suspicious look evaporated from the woman’s face; changing it to an awkwardly welcoming smile.

  ‘Oh, hello you two,’ she said, having the good the grace to at least blush slightly as she climbed off of Brett’s lap. ‘How’s your tree house… everything okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes thanks… it’s all a bit swish,’ smiled Fran, trying her best to ignore the way Brett leered at her despite the fact his hand still rested on Norma’s behind. ‘It’ll take some getting used to though… you’ve been very kind,’ she continued, throwing a bridge-building but ultimately ignored smile in Emma’s direction.

  ‘You’d be surprised what you can get used to, darling!’ laughed Grant, his tone causing Kai’s hand to subconsciously tighten about Fran’s.

  ‘Adapt or die…’ mumbled the unknown older man to himself, his words barely audible.

  ‘Like D…Darwin,’ said Kai, causing the man to slowly turn to look at him.

  The moment Fran saw the look in his eyes, she knew this was a man who had given up. Whether the fight had been beaten out of him or simply that the brutal existence thrust upon them all was too much for him to bear, she didn’t know but one thing was certain, this man lived but only in the sense that his heart was still beating.

  ‘Yes… yes, that’s right,’ he said, a sad and brittle smile on his lips.

  ‘Sidney Murray, our resident brain box,’ laughed Grant, extending his leg to kick the older man’s chair. ‘Better watch yourself, Sid… looks like you’ve got some competition.’

  ‘Grant,’ said Emma from the other end of the table, her single word of warning for him not to continue having an immediate effect.

  ‘Well, come in you two,’ Dennis suddenly said, half-heatedly waving them into the room, ‘Natalie move out of the way, stupid girl… and go and see what’s keeping Angela,’ he continued, causing Natalie to do a very good impression of a startled mouse. ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Yes, Dennis,’ she muttered, slipping deftly past Kai to go back outside, ‘I… I’ll find out.’

  ‘Angela?’ said Fran, wondering how many more people there were for them to meet.

  ‘Our… Wendy’s and my… mother,’ clarified Emma, the very word appearing to be distasteful for her to say.

  ‘And is that it…’ Fran went on to say, moving forward to take an empty seat at the table as close to Tom as she could; desperate to work out what was going on in his head. ‘I mean is this all of you?’

  ‘No, there’s two more, two lads… Ben Summers and Jimmy Watts,’ clarified Dennis, scratching at the stubble on his chin.

  ‘Yes, we saw Ben earlier,’ said Fran, with a nod. ‘Natalie was telling us about how he climbs the trees with a net…’

  ‘Yep, he’s a regular Monkey-boy that one,’ interrupted Dennis, as if completely disinterested in Fran’s opinion as he looked past her to the doorway. ‘Angela! Angela!’ he went on to shout, his patience clearly wearing thin. ‘Shift your arse, woman!’

  Just then the door opened and Natalie re-entered carrying a tray laden with bowls of steaming vegetables. Close on her heels was a short woman with pale features and dull brown hair. She had a smudge of ash across her cheek and the smell of wood smoke followed her into the room as she carried a large platter of meat before her.

  ‘About time,’ grumbled Dennis, as the woman Fran took to be Angela placed the platter of mixed meat in front of him. ‘Now… what have we got?’

  Whether his question had been a rhetorical one or she had simply chosen not to answer him, Fran had no idea; but as soon as she placed the dish of meat before Dennis, Angela Doyle was turning, already walking away from the table in mute subservience.

  ‘Like a beaten dog,’ Fran thought to herself, briefly catching Tom’s eye and instantly knowing he agreed with her.

  For a moment she thought she caught a glimpse of the old Tom, the Tom she knew and cared about, but then he blinked and once again a man she didn’t know was sat in his place.

  ‘Help yourself,’ said Emma, gesturing towards the plate of meat from which Dennis had already taken the largest cuts.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kai, spooning some of the shredded meat onto his plate while Angela Doyle silently slipped back into the room to place another plate of meat at the opposite end of the table.

  ‘Rabbit or cat?’ asked Fran, examining a piece of meat on a bone that had clearly never been attached to a bird as she passed the plate onto Mike.

  ‘Rabbit,’ replied Emma, spooning a heap of steamed cabbage from a bowl. ‘We breed them. Jimmy looks after them. He…’

  ‘When he’s not off his face,’ interrupted Dennis, giving Emma a look that suggested they had had this conversation before. ‘Lad has some serious relaxation habits... a good kicking would soon straighten him out.’

  ‘Dennis,’ said Emma, her expression as unreadable as stone.

  ‘What… what sort of habits?’ asked Mike, his curiosity piqued despite the tension that had descended on the table.

  ‘Well, he…’ Emma sighed.

  ‘He makes his own alcohol,’ Wendy suddenly chipped in, her eyes sparkling with mischief, ‘and he grows marijuana.’

  ‘Marijuana?’ asked Fran. ‘How on earth did he lay his hands on a marijuana plant?’

  ‘Bird seed,’ answered Emma. ‘Apparently it was quite common for them to have hemp seeds mixed in,’ she continued, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘Who knew?’

  ‘Fucking Jimbo, knew alright,’ snorted Dennis, sucking the meat from a rabbit thigh bone. ‘Little Sod even went to the trouble of secretly working a patch in the dome, waited until the seedlings took hold and then replanted the ones he wanted.’

  ‘Sounds like this Jimmy’s quite resourceful,’ noted Sam, only half listening to the conversation as she watched Wendy rocking Poppy back and forth in her arms.

  ‘Sounds like Jimmy wanted to get high more like,’ chuckled Mike, looking at the faces round the table and slightly disappointed to find that only the Nash brothers had cracked a smile.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dennis continued, tossing the stripped bone down onto his plate, ‘talking of resources… apart from that very useful horse and cart of yours, what do you lot bring to this party? I mean, I’ve heard that you two can handle yourselves,’ he continued, nodding towards Tom and Kai, ‘but what about you three? There are no free rides here… everyone has to contribute here.’

  ‘One way or another,’ mumbled Wendy, her words barely audible from behind her long fringe as she looked down at the infant in her arms.

  ‘How many of the Dead do you deal with on a daily basis?’ asked Mike, his abrupt question somewhat out of the blue.

  ‘Erm… well, we clear the forest of about a couple of dozen or so each morning... sometimes a few more, sometimes less,’ said Dennis, unsure where the younger man’s point was going. ‘Why
?’

  ‘And I’m willing to bet they mainly come in through the east side of the park, where the open woodland meets the main road…’ Mike continued, artfully setting the scene for a sales pitch that could see his family granted permanent safety within the tree house community. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Yeah, so?’ asked Dennis, his eyes flitting briefly to Emma.

  ‘I can make you screens,’ he began, his hands moving in front of him as if he could make those around him picture the walls of interwoven sticks he could make. ‘Blocking off that whole side of the park… now, I’m not saying it’ll be a quick job and I’ll need some help but in the long run I can hide us from the Dead… and then when it’s done, unless they’re attracted by some noise or something, they’ll shamble right past us… none the wiser.’

  ‘And you can do this?’ asked Emma, unexpectedly very interested in the young father with the honey coloured beard and tattooed arms.

  ‘He can do it,’ said Tom, suddenly speaking on Mike’s behalf. ‘We’ve seen his work… you’d walk right past thinking it was just a hedge if you didn’t know what to look for… it’ll help keep the Dead away,’ he continued, his voice dropping to a murmured whisper as he tuned to look at Wendy, ‘it’ll help keep you safe.’

  ‘So that just leaves you?’ said Dennis, turning his attention on Fran; certain that Mike would be earning his keep for both himself and his family.

  ‘Fran and I c…come as a p…package,’ interrupted Kai, placing his hand over hers. ‘She goes, I go.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, alright…calm down, Romeo,’ Dennis tutted, before turning his attention back to Fran. ‘So what’ve you got to offer?’

  She was just about to speak when from the other end of the table Fran heard Brett mutter something under his breath to his brother; the resulting laughter leading her to assume it had been something quite predictably childish and crude.

  ‘I have martial arts training,’ she replied ignoring the Nash brothers, ‘to championship level,’ she quickly added, as a disinterested look started to settle on Dennis’s face. ‘I can teach you to disable the Dead. Teach you so you can do it safely with minimal risk and…’