‘Their arms are moving too much,’ Leon called to Patrick, ‘I don’t want to risk a knife ending up in an arm when there are easier targets.’
‘Okay,’ Patrick replied, ‘we’ll get those two later. Can you get the other two?’
‘Sure thing,’ Leon said under his breath, more to himself than to Patrick, and looked toward the next walking corpse.
This time, Leon paused briefly, sickened by the abomination he was forced to confront. The creature that Leon thought might have been a man had a sagging mouldy bare chest, its ruined flesh writhing with maggots. Even as it took a shambling step towards the cart, its wriggling offspring dropped from rotten wounds to the floor.
‘Jesus,’ Leon whispered, as he pulled the third knife free of its sheath.
The maggot-ridden cadaver was now only a few meters away and even for the Dead, this one was ripe. Even their mare, which was used to the Dead pushing past her to get to the living within the cart, began to snort and swing her head in annoyance at the smell., Covering his mouth and nose with his arm to block out some of the fetid odour, with his eyes beginning to water, Leon threw his knife.
‘Crap,’ he said, as the knife in flight only sliced off an ear covered in green mould. His aim had been too low and far too much to the right.
‘I’ve got it, Hot-shot,’ came Ryan’s annoyed voice, loudly kicking open the side hatch.
‘Ryan!’ Patrick shouted, as he scrambled from his front seat after his idiot friend.
Ignoring Patrick, Ryan walked calmly up to the Dead thing to slam the blunt end of his pipe square in its chest. With the sound of decaying bones breaking and rancid flesh tearing, the creature stumbled backwards with something approaching surprise on its face. Then with a sucking sound, Ryan pulled his pipe free of the cadaver’s chest and readied himself for a second blow. With another shower of maggots falling to the floor, the animated corpse, ignoring the now gaping hole in its chest surrounded by shattered bone, lurched forward to grab the living flesh almost within reach. By now, the sixth and final member of this Dead gathering was only a few steps behind the maggot carrier. This final creature must have been verging on seventy when it succumbed to its unnatural existence and as Patrick ran past Ryan to tackle it, he thought it surprising the thing could still manage to stay upright on such skeletal limbs. With his muscular six-foot frame giving power behind his swing, Patrick’s club connected with the side of the Dead man’s head. With a sickening crunch, his decrepit skull not only shattered but also detached from the spinal column with such force that it tore itself free from the body completely. Briefly following the detached head with his eyes as it came to land in a small slushy puddle at the side of the road, Patrick glanced back to see how Ryan was faring. Ryan had taken a step back from the cadaver to give himself more room and then with a hefty kick to the maggot ridden chest, the animated corpse was thrown back onto the cracked road. Quicker than Patrick thought possible, Ryan then stepped forward, swung and buried his pipe deeply into the creature’s forehead. Patrick glared at Ryan, feeling the anger building within him.
‘You fucking…’ Patrick began, his anger boiling over.
‘Heads up guys!’ Leon’s urgent call came from above, interrupting him.
The two moving cadavers that had fallen finally righted themselves and they were slowly dragging broken limbs and torn dead flesh towards where Ryan and Patrick stood. As the two men turned, they saw another of Leon’s knives fly through the air and lodge in a Dead woman’s decaying skull. Falling to the road in a crumpled mess of soiled rags and limbs, one final almost relief filled moan escaped her Dead lips, before becoming still forever.
‘You, stay here,’ Patrick said through clenched teeth, as he prodded Ryan in the chest with his club.
Walking over to the remaining Dead man, Patrick realised the time for diplomacy with Ryan was over. Thanks to his actions, he had been left with no choice, He would have to have it out with him. Realising his mind wasn’t focusing on the task at hand, Patrick turned back to the Dead man shambling towards him. Excited by the proximity of Patrick’s living flesh, the Dead man reached slowly for him. Compared to his travelling companions, this corpse was in good shape and from the look of him, could not have been one of the Dead for more than a few weeks. Yes, a chunk of flesh might have been torn from his cheek and both his lips ripped away to reveal the yellowing bone beneath, but compared to the others, he looked positively healthy. Patrick looked at the Dead man in front of him. It took him a moment to realise what was wrong with the figure he saw. Both of the man’s hands were missing. From the look of the stumps, they didn’t appear to have been eaten away but more like removed by some sort of blade, not that his lack of hands made him any less dangerous. Wanting to get it over and done with, Patrick delivered a quick hard kick to the Dead man’s kneecap, snapping the leg sideways. With his club raised high, standing over the now prone corpse, Patrick took a deep breath. Letting the club fall with as much power as he could muster, Patrick aimed for the spot just above the bridge of the eyebrow bone. Oblivious to the club that would finally put an end to it unnatural existence, the Dead man’s stumps pawed impotently at Patrick’s trouser leg, desperate to get to the covered flesh. With the sound of a wet crack, they soon fell lifeless, no longer controlled by a brain that didn’t know its body should be still. Wiping the worst of the gore of off his club on a part of the Dead man’s jacket, Patrick tentatively lifted the now lifeless stump to take a closer look. Yes, they had definitely been amputated rather than eaten, he decided. What worried him though was the thin wire wrapped tightly around each wrist, so tight that it dug into the flesh.
‘This has been used as a type of tourniquet,’ he thought to himself. ‘These hands were removed while he was still alive and someone had wanted him to stay that way, for a while at least.’
Storing the information to think about later, Patrick knew that first, he had to deal with more pressing matters; namely Ryan. As he walked back to cart, he watched Ryan cleaning bits of bone and flesh from his trusty length of pipe.
‘So, what the fuck was that all about Ryan?’ He asked, trying to keep his anger in check.
‘What?’ Ryan replied, a bored tone creeping into his voice. ‘Knife boy here, missed, so I dealt with it, no…’
‘Dealt with it,’ Patrick interrupted. ‘You put us all in danger. You know the rule. We never leave the cart until we outnumber the Dead!’
‘But…’ Ryan tried to continue.
‘No fucking buts, you screwed up, Ryan. You screwed up. Oh, just get in the cart, Ryan,’ Patrick said, his anger evaporating leaving a tired sadness. The others had been right all along. Ryan was becoming a liability.
Travelling in silence along the cracked and overgrown lane, the fence that promised relief from the Dead soon came into view. They had survived another trip amongst the death and decay to return to the people they loved and cared for. They had returned to the one place left to them they could call home.
‘Well, at least there are no Dead at the gate,’ Leon observed absentmindedly as he peered through the front view slit over Patrick’s shoulder.
‘Do we need to raise the flag or can you see anyone in the open?’ he continued.
Should everyone be up on the pylon when a foraging party returned home, Duncan had constructed a hand-operated winch situated on the outside of the fence that would raise a flag within the grounds to alert those within of their presence.
Pulling Shadow to a halt, Patrick leant forward to get a better look.
‘Erm… yes, there’s Gabe over by the stable,’ he said. ‘Give him a shout will you.’
Flipping open the top hatch, Leon stood and with his loud high whistle breaking the silence, he managed to get Gabe to look in their direction. Recognising Shadow and the cart she pulled, Gabe waved enthusiastically at the returning group.
‘They’re back! Patrick and the others are back!’ he cried to the unseen people on the pylon above him, before jogging to one of the smal
l concrete block buildings to retrieve the padlock key.
‘They’re back, Sarah,’ he said with a beaming smile, running past the older woman as she came out of the livestock building, a basket of fresh eggs under her arm.
‘I heard you, Gabe. I heard you,’ she smiled, as she watched the eager teenager disappear inside the next building.
Gabe was a bit of a mystery to the rest of the survivors at the Substation. He was found wandering their fields eight months ago, alone and half starved. Unsure of even his real age, Gabe had been unable to tell them much of his past. He had probably only been six or seven when the Dead came to claim the earth as their own. His young mind, unable to process the many horrors he was unable to escape, had blocked out whole years of running and hiding. He sometimes had vague snapshot images of his parents that would rise through the fog of his memory but he knew at some point during those missing years, his parents had been taken from him by bloody hands and gnashing teeth. He remembered the lid of a large blanket box closing down on him, and his mother’s concerned face slowly disappearing from sight, as her hand slipped through to touch his cheek one more time. Then as he lay there curled in the darkness, he heard the screams. How he then escaped the Dead that surely had torn into his parents, he had no idea. He also had brief memories of creeping through the darkness foraging for food and even seeing other survivors from time to time. Wary of approaching the strangers, he kept to himself.
Over the years, Gabe developed a remarkable talent for hiding from the Dead. His small malnourished frame was perfect for sleeping away the day in even the smallest of crawlspaces. Cupboards, crates, the trunks of burnt out cars and even under floorboards; all were handy places to hide in. Spending his days hidden from both the living and Dead alike, he would then silently creep from his hiding place to begin his nocturnal scavenging. However, as puberty kicked in and his thin body grew taller, if not wider, he found many of his regular hiding spots were now too small for even his starved gangly limbs. He remembers leaving the urban sprawl that had become his night-time world when a large wave of the Dead descended upon the area. Even taking into account their poor night vision, he knew it would be stupid trying to stay. He had pushed his luck to the limits, nightly dodging their outstretched arms as they sensed his living body run past them, but now those arms were just too great in number and it was time to leave. Gabe was unable to recall completely how he left the city or how he ended up in the turned fields outside the Substation but he certainly remembered the constant hunger pains that never left him. When Patrick came upon him eating raw potatoes from the mud, he had simply been too weak to flee. Collapsed in Patrick’s arms, dirty and starving, he was carried to a new life, a new life of friends and safety behind the Substation’s high fences.
With the clucking of startled chickens, their evening doze interrupted, Gabe came rushing out of the cement block building with the padlock key clutched in his hand. Following at a more leisurely pace was J-Man.
‘He makes me feel old,’ he said to Sarah, nodding towards Gabe as he ran like an excited child to the gate.
‘Sweetheart, how do you think he makes me feel?’ Sarah replied with a chuckle.
‘Come on, old timer, let’s see what they managed to find for us,’ she continued, putting down the basket of eggs on a large plastic barrel and slipping her arm through J-Man’s. ‘Perhaps we’ll have something special for dinner tonight?’
The last seven years had not been kind to Sarah, not only robbing her of family and those that she loved but they also had stolen her looks. Bit by bit, the hard living had taken its toll until she appeared a good fifteen years older than she actually was. Even though Sarah realised it was utterly ridiculous even to think about such things when she was lucky to be alive at all, it still bothered her slightly. Although she had never been what was described as classically attractive, she had always been particular about her appearance, making the best of what she had been given. She had always one of the first in line for the next beauty miracle promising to keep the wrinkles at bay. At forty-five and as an executive for an exclusive brand of Health-spar products, it was just expected she should look a certain way. Of course, the Dead had changed all that. Her hair once cut, highlighted and styled to perfection was now a drab grey mess. Her skin once bathed in every conceivable mix of potion and lotion was now weather worn and wrinkled. So when one of the survivors brought back a half empty bottle of one of the old products she used to sell, it brought back a flood of bitter sweet memories. After the initial grieving for a way of life that no longer existed, she was surprised to notice that the happy memories had ridden piggyback with the bad. Small details came flooding back to her, everyday joyful things she had forgotten until triggered by the simple plastic bottle of conditioner she held in her hands. From that moment on she made it her mission to pass on this secret joy held by the mundane objects of their past. Anytime a group were going outside the fence, she would ask them to collect small random objects, knowing each one was a potential window to the past for someone. Bottles, packaging, old magazines or catalogues, she wanted them all. Her cabin on the Pylon was a celebration of what had been. People would often stop outside her door, peering at the walls covered in another life’s flotsam. Sometimes they would cry for a bit. Sometimes they would smile but always they would remember and that was the important thing for Sarah. They would remember a time before the Dead came to taint everything with their fetid corruption. They would remember their loved ones alive and happy, and if this memory could replace the scenes of horror that haunted their dreams just for a moment, it was worth it.
With the padlock sitting at his feet, Gabe was just removing the heavy chain that kept the gates secure when Sarah and J-Man arrived beside him. Normally, they would wait until those in the cart had removed any threat of the hungry Dead before opening the gate, but as there were none in sight, Gabe and J-Man each took one of the wide gates and pulled them open. Once Shadow had pulled the cart all the way in and the gate closed behind them, Gabe began to rewrap the heavy chain back through the metal supports of the gate methodically. Giving the gates a rattle and the locked padlock a final tug to make sure everything was secure again, Gabe ran back to the animal shed to replace the key. It was one of the rules of the Substation; the key was always replaced immediately on its hook, no exceptions.
Flipping open one of the side hatches, Leon’s smiling face appeared.
‘Hey, Sarah, you corrupting my J-Man there?’ He asked, nodding to her arm in his, ‘He’s an innocent, Lady. He don’t know shit about what to do with a real woman like you. You want to get yourself some Leon, he’ll treat you right,’ he continued, waggling his eyebrows and giving her a wink.
Squeezing his cheeks together with her fingers, Sarah lent in close to his now protruding lips.
‘I’d break you, honey,’ she said, giving him a friendly slap on the cheek, as behind her J-man burst into laughter.
‘She got you there man,’ J-Man said, stepping forwards to knock knuckles with his friend.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Leon said, joining Sarah and J-Man on the ground. ‘You’re a wicked woman, Sarah.’
‘But that’s why you love me,’ she replied, pulling the young man into a friendly hug. ‘I’m glad you came home safely. Any trouble?’
‘Well,’ Leon began but stopped himself as Ryan jumped from the cart and walked past the group and over to the ramp leading up onto the Pylon.
‘Oh dear,’ said Sarah, her eyes following the troubled figure of Ryan as he disappeared into his cabin on the first platform of the pylon.
‘Is anyone going to help unload all this stuff?’ Patrick asked, pulling the first sack of potatoes from the cart with a grunt.
‘Sorry, Man,’ J-man said, taking the sack from Patrick. ‘You go get reacquainted with Helen and Jasmine. I’ll get some of the others to unload all this. You too, Leon, we’ve got this.’
‘Thanks,’ Patrick and Leon replied in unison.
‘Welcome home, man,’
J-Man said, slapping Patrick’s shoulder as he walked past rubbing the sore muscles of his neck.
Being such a tall man had its disadvantages when it came to travelling in the cart. Hunched over for hours at a time so he could see clearly through the front view slit, he always ended trips with a terrible stiff neck, which only Helen’s soothing touch could relieve.
‘Make sure you rub Shadow down well and give her a good feed,’ Patrick called over to Gabe who was unhitching the black mare.
With a wave, Gabe led Shadow slowly to the stable building, patting and stroking her muzzle as he talked softly to the trusted beast placed in his care.
Seeing the arrival of the cart some of the other members of the Substation community began to jog down the ramp, eager to help move the much-needed food into the storage building. Each saying their ‘hellos’ and ‘welcome homes’ as they passed Patrick, the return of the cart meant they could all eat well again for the next few weeks. The smiles he got from the passing faces almost made the three days away from Helen and his daughter worth it. Well, almost.
They had gone to the former Penhaligan place to collect some of their stored fruit and vegetables. The manor house with its large vegetable garden, fruit orchard and more importantly a cool, dry cellar had been a welcome addition to their resources. Like Charlie of the Lanherne community, the Penhaligan family had fallen victim to the blade wielded by a religious fanatic six months ago. Only their youngest son, Alex, had survived and only then by virtue of his age alone. He now lived with the rest of the rescued children, safe behind the high walls of the Lanherne convent. Leon, Ryan and Patrick had spent much of their time at the Penhaligan digging up potatoes and harvesting cabbages. It had proven to be back breaking work, but if they wanted to eat, it was a necessary evil. They also brought with them two sacks of apples they had been storing in the dry cellar. The orchard had given them a bumper harvest and after carefully wrapping each apple in old dry newspaper, they easily had enough to last them for the next few months.
Five More Days With The Dead (Lanherne Chronicles Book 2) Page 2
