SIX DAYS WITH THE DEAD
By
Stephen Charlick
With thanks to Nadine, Bryon
and
all the other walking corpses I know.
Cover artwork by: [email protected]
© copyright: Stephen Charlick 2012
DAY 1
‘Take your sister, Lizzie!’ Carol whispered, as she handed her daughter the baby she had been holding tightly to her chest.
The 10 year old looked up at her mother, fear clearly written on her young face. Seeing the thing that only that morning had been her loving father, attack nice old Mrs Chilvers from next door had changed her young mind for ever. Something had broken in her, even though she didn’t have the words to explain it.
The bathroom door banged again, her mother breathing in and out heavily as she put her hands against it. She could see her mother’s hands shaking, leaving bloody prints behind.
Carol looked down at her daughter, her own fear mirrored in Lizzie’s wide eyes. She didn’t know why Dave had pounced on their neighbour as he had lumbered through the door, his teeth quickly ripping at the old woman’s throat. She had tried to pull him off, the blood making her hands slip. Sooner than she thought possible, Mrs Chilvers struggles became weaker and weaker and then stopped altogether. But Dave kept on chewing, pulling at strips of skin and flesh like he was starving and Mrs Chilvers was a last chance at a meal. And then slowly he turned his face to her.
‘His eyes are wrong.’ She thought.
As if the flesh in his mouth and the blood over his face weren’t wrong enough, his eyes, white and filmy, looked without seeing yet they saw her. A hunger she had never seen in those eyes bore into her. Slowly he struggled to get up. Carol knew whatever that man was in front of her, it was not her Dave. This thing, and instinctively she knew that’s just what it was now, a thing, this thing was not her Dave and never would be again.
It was then that Lizzie’s screams broke through her shocked stillness. Breaking eye contact, she grabbed her daughter and ran to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. With no lock on the door she knew this was no safe haven. She ran to the cot in the corner, picking up her 3 month old baby.
‘The bathroom!’ she thought, ‘The bathroom door locks!’
Pushing Lizzie in front of her, she moved just as the bedroom door swung open, the thing that had been Dave standing there, his dead eyes turned in her direction. She threw the door closed behind her, pulling the bolt across.
‘Take your sister Lizzie!’
The door banged again. The creature with stolen flesh in its teeth and blood on its hands was banging his fists wildly on the thin wood. He wanted in and she knew it wouldn’t hold for long. Already cracks had begun to appear along one side. With her hands still shaking, she backed away as the thing threw itself against the door again and again. The wood splintered, the crack becoming a hole. Soon bloody fingers were forcing their way through it, the skin ripping from them, in their desperation to get to her and her children. Backing up to the small window, she knew their time was running out. She threw the window open, pulling Lizzy up to stand on the side of the bath. Toothbrushes and toiletries scattering across the floor, as perfume bottles smashing at her feet.
‘Through the window Lizzie! Now!’
Her daughter looked at her, not knowing what she was meant to do, the words not meaning anything to her shocked mind. Her mother took the baby from her and pushed Lizzy through the open window. The short drop to the grass below felt a world away from the horror she had just seen. The horror that had been Dad. She looked up at her mother.
‘Lizzy!’ Her mother screamed.
There was a loud bang and her mother’s face froze, horrified as she glanced back into the bathroom.
‘Oh my God! Lizzy take Anne and run!’ Her baby sister falling from her mother’s arms into her lap.
‘Run!... Run now!’ her mother screamed, as bloody hands grabbed her face from behind. The screaming continued as her mother tried to fight off her father.
‘Run Lizzie. Oh my God, Run! Run!’ and then the screaming got higher, wilder, turning into a raw, animal sound of pure horror. And then nothing.
Lizzie backed away from the window, her sister moving in her arms but held tightly just like her mother had shown her. She looked up at the open window, a hole into a world that was now gone for ever. A shape appeared in the hole, and then another and then another. Three things, bloody and torn, that had once been her loving parents and caring neighbour stood staring at her with blind empty eyes. And then as one they lunged for the window, lunged for her…
She opened her mouth and screamed…
She was awake again, her heart pounding and breath short. It was always the same. Always those first few minutes of the end of everything, those were the minutes that replayed themselves, uninvited, as she slept. The countless other horrors she’d witnessed, the friendly strangers who had looked after her and her sister only to die horribly one by one over the next seven years, rarely interrupted her sleep. Just those last moments with her family.
‘Lizzy, you’re having the bad dream again.’ Her sister Anne said, reaching across from the bunk next to her, to touch her shoulder. A simple reassurance that the seven year old girl knew always calmed her older sister when the nightmares came. This was the time when it was Anne who looked after Lizzy, their roles reversed.
‘I’m OK, Anne, I’m OK.’ She patted her sisters hand, gently squeezing her fingers, as she always did when she could see that look of concern in Anne’s eyes.
‘Go back to sleep, I’m sorry I woke you.’ A shaky smile on her lips.
Anne, wiser than her years wasn’t fooled. She had seen so much death in her young life. So many friends gone, taken in the most horrific manner, snatched from her by bloody hands and dead faces. Only Liz had been there the whole time, never leaving her. Liz had fought for her more times than she could remember and killed countless of the Dead to protect her. She had seen the wildness in her sister, her blade whispering through the air, removing hands, heads and any threat that reached for her with death in their bite.
‘Sorry Anne, honestly I’m OK. Go back to sleep.’ said Liz, as she pulled the blanket back over her sister’s shoulder.
Anne, who had in her short life got used to sleeping when she could, rolled over and closed her eyes. Watching Anne’s breathing slow down, her muscles relaxing, Liz knew she would be back asleep shortly. Liz gently moved a curl of Anne’s hair from across her face. Looking down at Anne, Liz could see the ghost of her mother’s face lying there. Anne had the same blond curls that she remembered her mother having. The same round shape to her face and the same softness in her eyes that could never hide her true feelings. Liz, on the other hand had taken on her father’s looks. Her hand slowly went up to her short dark hair, remembering her Dad stroking her hair when they used to watch television after bath night. Of course, her hair had been long then but in this world where death could be a hands grab away, all women had their hair cut short. Liz, now seventeen, had grown into a young woman whose toned body and pretty face hid a quickness and power that kept the dead and any unwanted attention from men, at arm’s reach. More than once she had left a man on the floor nursing a bloody lip or cracked rib. A man who thought just because she was a woman, she was to be taken, to be claimed, the way they claimed the bottles of alcohol on scavenging trips among the Dead.
Glancing at the clock, Liz knew there was no point trying to get more sleep. She was on patrol shift in an hour and she wanted to be prepared. Many of the other inhabitants of the Lanherne Convent thought that now they had found safety behind the high convent walls, they could relax. But she had learnt the hard way, nowhere was truly
safe. The last place she and her sister had stayed had gone the way of the rest of the Dead lands. A woman had died after giving birth from blood loss. She had been alone at the time and after killing and eating most of her own baby, she had wandered the compound spreading the Death infection bite by bite. Liz and Anne had only escaped that time because of Charlie.
Charlie was an ex-soldier. Sergeant Charles Philips of the Royal Artillery had fought a long forgotten war in a hot distant land but had been sent home after he lost a hand to a road side bomb. Even with only one hand, Charlie was one of the best fighters she had met. He had taught her to use a sword with a swiftness and accuracy that surprised many. He gave her the skills that could keep herself and Anne alive in this harsh world. Charlie looked at the two lost girls as his adopted daughters. They were a distant but painful reminder of his own child he had lost when the world had changed. As painful as the memories were, he loved the two girls and saw them as a way to make amends. He hadn’t been able to save his own child from the horrors that swept through the world, town by town, but he knew he would die to keep these girls safe and alive.
Liz reached for the long blade that had become more than a piece of metal and more than a weapon. It was part of her now, an extension of her arm itself. Turning the sword in her hand she looked at her reflection, the light from the small high window dancing along the blade. She pulled out a cleaning cloth from a bag and began polishing the metal to a high shine.
‘Look after your weapon like your life depended on it because one day it just might.’ Charlie had told when he first gave her the sword.
She had never forgotten those words, she knew she couldn’t afford to and once she was satisfied it was clean, she deftly slid the blade into its sheath.
‘Anne, I’m going down to the kitchen before patrol.’ Liz said, strapping her sword on her back.
Anne moaned an acknowledgement but didn’t really wake.
‘And don’t forget to bolt the door.’ She continued, as she left the room.
Even in her half sleep state, Anne got out of bed and bolted the door behind her.
‘A bolted door can save your life if the Dead come.’ Charlie had told her, ‘It can keep you safe until your sister or I can come get you.’
Liz made her way along the still corridor and past the other small rooms that once would’ve held the Carmelite sisters of Lanherne. Liz didn’t know what had happened to the many sisters that must have been cloistered here at one time. With true Christian charity, the Mother Superior and the remaining four nuns kept to the small, draughty north wing of the convent. They had selflessly given up the drier, warmer rooms when Liz, Anne, Charlie and the others had arrived a year ago. Lanherne Convent had seemed a paradise when the small convoy rolled up to the large iron gates. Set in the rural Cornish countryside, far away from big towns that were now just death traps filled with the infected Dead, the three metre high walls now kept safe a mismatch of twenty-six near strangers. Strangers held together in their fight to survive.
As she made her way down the worn stone staircase she glanced through a small window. Out over the large area where this season’s vegetables were ripening for harvest, over to the animal sheds, housing the goats and their precious horses, and beyond to where the high wall loomed. The wall, that made their safe prison possible, now had a walkway running the perimeter. Some of the men had constructed it last summer when they first arrived. The scaffolding poles looked at odds against the aged dark stone work.
‘Worst part of having a wall, is not knowing what’s on the other side,’ Alice had told her when Charlie and the men had started building the walkway, ‘It’s good to know what’s out there.’
Liz liked Alice. Older than Liz, Alice had a bit of a thing for Charlie and Liz suspected the affection was returned. She saw a softness in his eyes whenever Alice was around. Quite often she would catch him watching Alice when he thought no-one was looking. She hoped they would get through pretending to be just friends soon and start getting happy. Happiness had been in too short a supply since the infected refused to stay dead.
When she got down to the kitchen, Alice was already there with Sister Rebecca making porridge.
‘You’re up early. Couldn’t sleep?’ Sister Rebecca asked, as she stirred the big pot.
‘Just the usual, you know...’ Liz didn’t like to talk about the dreams.
She knew everyone had been through their own horrors. In fact Alice had barely escaped some men who had turned on the weaker members of a community in which she thought she had found refuge. Killing one while he was raping her, she fled into the Dead lands, alone and unarmed, leaving the men to deal with him as he came back hungry.
‘My God! At least you don’t see the dead turning on each other.’ Liz had exclaimed when Alice had first told her.
‘No… and no matter what anyone says at least they don’t have control over what they do. They’re like a computer running through the same program over and over again. Feed, that’s all they can do. It’s just our bad luck that we happen to die while that program is running.’ Alice had replied, ‘No, the world may be filled with monsters Liz but not all of them are the Dead.’
‘Do you want some porridge Liz?’ Sister Rebecca asked, as she ladled some in to bowl.
At seventy, Sister Rebecca had been lucky to have been cloistered in the convent with the other nuns when the world fell apart seven years ago. Having lived so long on the outside of society, the nuns way of life hadn’t really changed that much. They still farmed their own vegetables, reared their chickens and goats and collected the honey from the bee hives. The only difference now was that there was no electricity and that they now had the horses that had been found abandoned in a field. They had used the last of their petrol collecting them but they were certainly worth their weight in gold now. Luckily, the Dead were relatively scarce in the surrounding countryside then and with Sister Claire growing up on a farm, they had collected them swiftly without drawing attention to themselves. After the water went off, the convent sisters collected rain water for a long time until one of their visitors had rigged up a manual pump drawing water from a nearby stream.
‘With the grace of God and our Holy Mother, we will survive’ was a constant phrase at the convent and it seemed the Lanherne Convent was one of the few places God seemed to look upon favourably.
Liz gratefully took the bowl of steaming porridge from Sister Rebecca.
‘Do we have any honey?’ She asked.
She knew she had grown soft over the last year, enjoying many luxuries she never thought possible in the years of just barely surviving. Not just the big things like a place to sleep without the constant fear that Dead hands and teeth would come out of the dark, claiming you or those you loved but simple things like warm food in your belly and a chance to wash, that was more than a dip in a cold river. She had grown into an attractive young woman but thought nothing of stripping off her clothes in front of Charlie for a brisk river wash, as did he. It was just normal. It could mean the difference between being clean and alive or hanging around behind a bush waiting to be alone. When you were naked and alone, alone could get you killed damn quick. Privacy and prudishness were now just one of the many forgotten things of an old world.
‘One washes, one watches.’ Charlie always said.
So to be able to have a warm shower or bath and washed clothes, now seemed like heaven. Yes, you had to pump the water yourself and fill the old metal claw-foot bath, bucket by bucket as it boiled on the range. But Boy! Was it worth it.
‘Here,’ Alice said, as she pulled the jar from the cupboard, ‘and I thought I was going to have to shake you out of your bed this morning. Only half an hour early for shift, that’s practically slovenly for you.’ A smile creeping on her face.
Liz was well known for always being last off shift and first on. It was if she still couldn’t relax. In her head she doubted she ever really would. With Anne to protect she just couldn’t trust other people with their lives.
What if they fell asleep on watch? What if they thought that shadow by the tree was just a shadow, when maybe it wasn’t. No, the only eyes and instincts she truly trusted were her own and Charlie’s. The Dead mainly moved slowly but if you didn’t keep your wits about you, they were on you before you knew it and then you had a new fast and very angry corpse to deal with too. That was the odd thing about the Infected, for the first few hours when they first came back the Dead would be wild and fast, tearing at everything and everyone to get to flesh. These were the most dangerous.
In the beginning whole communities were wiped out overnight as the Dead fled hospitals and field stations, wild and bloody, attacking all they came in contact with. The infection spread outwards like the ripple on a pond surface, their numbers increasing exponentially with every ripple. Then after the first few hours, they slowed like a spent wind-up toy, the speed in their limbs evaporating. They would still kill you if they got you cornered or outnumbered but at least with these you had a chance. If you kept calm you could even walk right past them, their strained, tortured movements slow to react. Charlie thought it was because when the Infection first brought the Dead back, the brain was still fresh, with more or less normal motor control. Over time this would deteriorate as the brain itself decayed. They had seen many of the infected Dead from the early days, who had been so exposed to the elements that their brain could only be little more than a soup in their skulls. Corpses in fields with parchment thin skin, unable to do little more then follow them with their dry filmy eyes, if they had them, would still let loose a faint deathly moan from their withered lungs. You were vigilant where you stepped through high grass. Each step you took a careful one, for ankles were just the right height for slow Dead mouths with death on their hungry shrivelled lips.
People had given up trying to find out why the Dead had refused to stay dead. As always religion and science fought with each other, saying they knew best. A mutation of the Syphilis virus becoming air born and then staying dormant in the cranial fluids until deprived of oxygen had been quite popular for a while. But they had had their pick, ranging from bio-terrorism to an extra-terrestrial bacteria and of course every Government under the sun was to blame. But at the end of the day when the Dead were fighting over bloody organs ripped from a chest of someone you loved, the ‘whys’ didn’t really matter all that much. As always the wrath of God argument came and went but was never truly popular. In a world filled with such tragedy, no one liked to think they had been so completely abandoned and punished by the Divine.
Six Days With the Dead Page 1
