Six Days With the Dead

by Stephen Charlick

  So they were pleased that after only a few hours they began to see the motorway coming up in the distance. Liz breathed a sigh of relief when they first realised the track continued over the motorway via a bridge rather than a tunnel. Despite the high fence that would have kept the Dead from the tacks, she didn’t relish the idea of travelling through a dark tunnel. With not being able to see what was in front of them, you didn’t know what could be lying in wait. Any pleasure they felt by approaching the motorway so soon, began to evaporate when they got close enough for it to be more than a distant rusting manmade scar across the landscape. Living at Lanherne, in their relatively hidden away existence, it was easy to sometimes forget just how much Man has lost to the Dead. Obviously each had had their own horrific experiences and they had certainly all lost many they loved when the world had changed. But to witness the rusting evidence of the devastation stretching off into the distance was breath-taking in its scale. As they approached the bridge that was to take them over the motorway, Charlie turned to them and spoke in a serious hushed tone.

  ‘Look, we don’t know how many of the Dead are still lurking around down there, so until we’re over the bridge we’re on silent mode. Got it? Last thing we want is a hoard of the Dead trying to climb the embankment up to the track and heaven help us if they managed to get through the fence, they’d be on our tail all the way to Carnglaze.’

  With equally serious nods from the other three, Charlie turned back round. He knew they already understood the danger they would be in if things went wrong, but better to repeat the obvious than put their lives in jeopardy.

  ‘Right, here goes nothing,’ Charlie said to himself.

  With a gentle flick of the reins, Charlie coaxed Delilah forward. Not only was walking on the gravel, scattered between the sleepers, uncomfortable for the horse but the cloying scent of death hung in the air like an invisible fog making her unusually jittery. Delilah wasn’t normally affected by the Dead in such a way, so Charlie knew there must a great number still on the road below them to unnerve the steady mare in such a way. Glancing down at the motorway below him, Charlie could understand poor Delilah’s apprehension but they had a job to do. Step by step, Delilah slowly pulled them over the bridge. When they were just over half way across, Alice quietly slid aside one of the spy hole covers to look at the scene below them. What she saw made her breath catch in her throat and her heart pound frantically. She looked back at Liz, her eyes wide with fear, a nervous sweat beading on her forehead. Taking the unspoken hint, Liz also moved to take in the scene. At first all Liz saw were the mangled and twisted wrecks spreading way into the distance. It wasn’t until one of the Dead stumbled slightly that she noticed them literally everywhere along the road. Below the bridge, the Dead stood in their thousands. They waited silently, shoulder to shoulder between the crushed vehicles, like an army awaiting command. In life these people had been trapped by their sheer numbers, dooming themselves to a hideous death and, so too now were the Dead. Unable to move forward or back, the Dead stayed motionless, just waiting for something living to catch their attention. Despite their vast number, she hadn’t even noticed them at first because they had been so still. It didn’t help either that the dried blood covering their decaying forms had turned a deep dusty red colour, matching much of the burnt and rusting wreckage about them. Liz gave an involuntary shiver and turned away from the nightmare scene below them. She knew that if this army of the Dead, even in their decrepit state, ever went on the march, there wouldn’t be a wall high enough to keep them out. They would descend upon the living like a biblical plague of locust, devouring all in their path.

  Everyone breathed a heavy sigh of relief once they had finally made it across the bridge with-out attracting the attention of the Dead hoard below them. Even Delilah seemed to perk up once she had left the oppressive smell of the Dead behind her.

  ‘Right, so how far till we can get back onto the road?’ Imran asked, once they had left the motorway far behind them.

  Charlie spread the unfolded map out to study their options.

  ‘Well, we don’t want to leave too early and give up the easy going too soon, but then we don’t want to risk missing the exit the Reverend took either,’ Charlie said, looking at each crossing they would come to on the map and following the roads there back to the caverns. ‘He obviously knows how to use the rail network efficiently and wouldn’t give up the easy travelling until it was absolutely necessary, so I think this one here is our best bet.’

  Charlie indicated a crossing a few miles down the track, leading from which were a set a winding roads which would eventually take them to Carnglaze and hopefully to Anne. With only Charlie’s gut instinct to go on, they all agreed it was as good a choice as any.

  ‘Here it is, coming up ahead’ Charlie said, after they had been travelling for an hour.

  ‘Shit! The gates are closed!’ he continued.

  ‘So? We opened the other ones on the way back to Lanherne. We can open these,’ Liz said, confused as to why Charlie was so het up about the gates.

  ‘Yes, we can open them but the point is, it took both Imran and me to open them last time. The Reverend wouldn’t stand a chance of manually moving that counterweight by himself and that wife of his wouldn’t have been much help either, so he can’t have used this crossing’ he replied.

  ‘Oh.’ Liz said feeling a little foolish for not seeing what should have been obvious. ‘I guess we’ll have to try the next crossing then.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Charlie said, a little put out that his hunch about this crossing had been wrong.

  Delilah had just pulled them level with the gate and Charlie couldn’t help but give it a dirty look as they passed. Unsure of something Charlie pulled Delilah to a stop. He had noticed something that looked slightly wrong with the way the gate was hanging and wanted to check it out to be sure.

  ‘That sneaky bastard!’ Charlie said, a smile creeping across his face, realising he had been right about the gate after all. ‘Oh, he’s a sly one is the Reverend Nathan Moore.’

  Only now that they were level, could Charlie see that the counterweight had actually been neatly cut through at the pivotal point where it joined the bar part of the gate, so at first glance it looked untouched and impassable. With the actual gate part now just propped up against the post, it meant a single man could easily move the gate to the side, allowing a cart to pass and then close it afterwards to cover their tracks.

  ‘Looks like we’re on the right track then,’ Liz said, nudging Imran to move over a little.

  She had just returned after moving the gate aside for Delilah to pass and Imran had decided to spread out a bit in her absence. Instead of moving over, Imran pulled her closer to him, taking comfort in the closeness of her body.

  ‘We’ll get them Lizzy and we’ll make them pay,’ he said quietly into her hair as he breathed in her scent to calm himself.

  ‘This isn’t about revenge, Imran,’ Charlie said, looking back over his shoulder at three of the most important people left in his life. ‘It’s about getting Anne, Alex and Emma’s baby back from those lunatics, that’s all. We’re not here to conjure up some long drawn out torture for the Reverend and his wife, just to make us feel better. Because, believe me, down the road when you look back at what you did, it’ll make you feel a heck of a lot worse about yourself. Bad things like that tend to have a way of leaving their mark on a person and once you’ve gone down that path you’re never quite the same again. So no, we just get the kids back and put the Reverend and his wife out of action for good. Clean and simple, you understand?’

  ‘Clean and simple,’ Imran said with a sharp nod, but Liz could still feel the tension in his body and knew given the chance ‘clean and simple’ would be the last thing on his mind.

  She would have to keep an eye on Imran, if only to save him from doing something that he may regret in the future. Mohammed’s death had obviously hit him hard and his pain was still blatantly raw, so Liz didn’t blame hi
m for this reaction. Nearly everyone she knew had lost people they loved to the Dead, but each had to find a way to move past their pain and anger, otherwise they became consumed by their grief. The pain could so easily become such an integral part of them, that something within them changed permanently and they became totally defined by their grief. Liz had met people like this, their anger and pain twisting inside them so they spent their whole time raging against the world and the other survivors within it. She didn’t think she could stand to see Imran change in this way and prayed that with her love, he would be able to eventually move on to live the life Mohammed would’ve wanted for him.

  Now that they had left the train line behind them, they were making slow pace again, having to manoeuvre around fallen trees, large potholes and the abandoned cars that were once again the norm. Each time they passed a rusting vehicle, Liz would stare blankly and wonder of the untold story each held. There would inevitably be the rag covered remains, lying forever abandoned where they had fallen. Of course, all would have their skulls shattered or broken in some way or another and Liz would wonder if a friend or loved one had been forced to deal with their Dead travelling companion, for themselves to eventually join them in their un-natural Dead state. A decaying mess of rags and bones, surrounded by scattered weather worn possessions was not much of an obituary for a life lived and that’s what depressed her the most. No one would ever know what had happened here or who had spent their last terrified moments on earth praying for an oblivion that would be forever denied them.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Charlie said, pulling Delilah to a stop.

  With the others huddling over his shoulder, they looked out of the front view slit at the hanging corpse before them. There, held aloft by her manacled hands to a telegraph pole, were the remains of a Dead woman. A large and well fed rook perched upon her head, pecked lazily at the insects burrowing about in the thin lank hair hanging over her face. Noticing the unwanted visitors, the rook let out an annoyed call to those in the cart before returning to its meal. Alerted by the rook, the Dead woman slowly turned her rotten face in the direction of the cart, it was at that moment the rook decided to pluck out her remaining film covered eye. As the optic nerve stretched and finally snapped, the rook gave one final call before taking flight with its stomach churning meal held tightly in its beak. As if the tableau before them wasn’t horrific enough, the fact that this woman had had the flesh stripped from below the knee only made it worse.

  ‘From the look of her, I’d say she was put up there alive,’ Charlie said, shaking his head with sad disbelief. ‘The Dead must have feasted on the flesh on her legs until she bled to death and turned.’

  ‘Fuck…’ Imran said, summing the whole situation up in one word.

  ‘My God! What on earth is happening to people,’ Alice said, turning away having seen enough, ‘just when you think it things can’t get worse, we find a whole new level of shit to deal with.’

  ‘Do you think this is some of the Reverend’s handy-work?’ Liz asked, her concern and fear for Anne’s safety increasing.

  With a creased brow and a shrug of his shoulders, Charlie urged Delilah forward again. It was one thing to kill but this was torture born of an insane and unbalance mind, pure and simple.

  Turning a corner in the lane, they were met again by another hanging corpse, this one had at one time been a teenage boy. His thin and under developed body was naked apart from the soiled underwear he wore, the Dead having torn the trousers from his kicking legs, as they fought to get to the flesh hidden beneath. As they drew level with the unfortunate creature, he turned to look at them, the hunger for flesh tearing at his very soul, clear to see as he let forth a whispering moan.

  ‘Shit!’ Charlie said, realising the hanging cadaver was at just the right height to be able to look through the slit into the cart at him. ‘He can see us.’

  ‘And that’s not all, look!’ Imran said indicating down the road.

  There further along the lane was another pole, complete with a Dead man hanging from it.

  ‘If they’re all hanging at the same height, they’ll all be able see us,’ he continued, ‘and with each of them moaning as we pass, it’s like some sort of macabre alarm system.’

  ‘So that means we must be getting close,’ Liz added, hopefully, ‘but we’re going to have to find a way of silencing this alarm or they’ll certainly know someone’s on the way.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Charlie said seriously, trying to come up with a plan.

  ‘Well, I can shut them down from a distance but we’ll have to pull up alongside them afterwards, I’d rather not waste the arrows and who knows what’s up ahead,’ Imran said, reaching for the top hatch.

  ‘Do you think you can take out this one and the one further down the road from where we are now?’ asked Charlie, peering through the front slit and judging the distance to the next pole. ‘We don’t want to alert the one after that one that we’re coming, so you need to pop up, take your two shots and be out of sight until we’ve reached the second one, where you get your arrow back and fire at the next one down the road.’

  ‘Sort of like throwing stepping stones ahead of you, to cross a river?’ said Alice.

  ‘Yeah, sort of,’ Imran said, squinting his eyes as he wondered if he’d be able to make an accurate head shot at this distance.

  Realising it was really their only option, he readied himself for a second, before throwing open the hatch. With amazing swiftness and power the first arrow flew, silencing the Dead teenager, his head was knocked to the side by the sheer power behind the arrow. As it shot through his skull it erupted part way through the other side. Then with smooth practised movements, Imran reached back for another arrow from his quiver, reloaded, took aim at the hanging cadaver on the next telephone pole and fired. This time the power behind the arrow was reduced by the distance it covered before reaching its target, but thankfully it still hit home. The hanging Dead man had just begun to turn his head in Imran’s direction when the arrow flew to end his unnatural existence. The rooks had also feasted on this Cadaver and like the woman, one of his eyes was missing. So when the arrow lodged deep through the socket of his remaining right eye, he was effectively blinded. As the creature’s world disappeared into blackness, the Dead man became still. With nothing to excite it any longer, it would simply hang there until it rotted and fell to the ground.

  Delilah pulled the cart level with the Dead teenager Imran had put down. Climbing out onto the roof and sitting on the edge of the cart, Imran lent across and with a foot against his head for leverage, yanked the arrow free from the still corpse. Knocking his leg against the side of the cart as a signal for Charlie, Imran stayed sitting out on the roof while Delilah pulled them down the road to the next quiet hanging corpse. Before he removed the arrow from this one, Imran took aim at a Dead woman hanging by her wrists on the next telephone pole.

  ‘Gotcha!’ he said under his breath, as the arrow flew and found its target effortlessly.

  Satisfied that they would now not be seen by any of the hanging Dead, Imran reached over to the cadaver hanging next to him, the arrow buried deep in his eye-socket. Imran’s hand had barely closed over the end of the arrow to wiggle to it free, when the Dead man suddenly jerked its head towards him, its teeth snapping wildly at flesh it could no longer see. Luckily for Imran, the blinded corpse had only been relying on its hearing. If it had seen him, he certainly wouldn’t have missed Imran’s tasty fingers so close to his Dead mouth.

  ‘Shit!’ Imran said, kicking himself away from the corpse.

  Realising that this noise was making the plan to keep the Dead quiet a bit pointless, Imran quickly pulled his hunting knife from the sheath on his ankle and drove it home through the top of the Dead man’s skull, finally putting the corpse to rest.

  ‘From now on, I think I’ll give them a poke before I let my hands get too close,’ Imran called to Charlie in the cart, re-sheathing his knife.

  That had been stupid and far too close a
call for Imran’s liking. A few centimetres to the right and the Dead man’s jaws would have clamped down on his fingers, and it would have been ‘goodnight Imran’ forever.

  ‘God, I have to be more careful…’ he thought to himself.

  Imran climbed back into the cart and waited for Delilah to pull them level with the next hanging Dead woman, who now had his arrow lodged in her skull. Once again he fired another arrow at the next hanging corpse, before retrieving the one from the woman. Thankfully, they managed to get all the way along the road with no further mishaps, leaving a trail of the hanging Dead, silenced forever, behind them.

  ‘Looks like we’re leaving the road,’ Charlie said, looking at the hanging corpses leading down a gravel side road.

  ‘It’s like some macabre Hansel and Gretel bread crumb trail, leading them home,’ Alice said, looking up at the mouldy cadaver in front of them.

  Liz looked up from the map and pushed it in front of Charlie, her finger marking the location of Carnglaze Caverns.

  ‘If we’re here, then the caverns are just down this lane,’ she said, following the small line on the map that led them to Carnglaze and hopefully Anne, ‘see?’

  ‘Hmm, you’re not wrong,’ Charlie replied, briefly double checking the map. ‘Right, let’s weapon up. We’re going the rest of the way on foot. Imran can you kill that Dead man, no point in having them alerted we’re coming sooner than necessary.’

  As Imran did as he was told, Alice and Liz began stuffing various objects in a rucksack that they may need. All the ammo for the guns, a small medical kit, the binoculars, some wire cutters and an assortment of knives were hastily thrown in. Once it was full, Alice slipped it onto her back and after making a few adjustments so it was comfortable, she was ready to go.