‘He took everything from me,’ Lucy said softly to no one in particular, ‘he took it all.’
Suddenly, there was a flash of reflected light in the girl’s hand and Lucy darted forward. With a cry of rage and desperation, Lucy plunged the shard of broken glass deep into Ridge’s thigh.
‘Fuck!’ the Sergeant cried, smashing Lucy across the face with the back of his fist, knocking her to the floor. ‘You fucking crazy bitch!’
‘Hey!’ shouted Steve, raising his rifle.
‘The little bitch stabbed me!’ Ridge snapped, blood pumping through his fingers as he tried to put pressure on the wound.
Behind him, Lucy rose shakily to her feet, her baby still held in one arm. Liz caught her glassy stare and instantly knew something was wrong, something was very wrong.
‘Lucy?’ Liz repeated, trying to break through to the girl.
‘He took everything,’ she said again, her hand slowly rising to the bolt on the door.
Realising the girl was doing something behind him, Sergeant Ridge began to turn.
‘He took it all,’ Lucy finally said, her delicate fingers tightening on the end of the bolt.
‘No!’ shouted Andrews and Ridge in unison, each of them desperate to stop the girl, but for quite different reasons.
But before either of them could take a step, Lucy had pulled the bolt free, opening the door.
In deadly wave of decaying limbs and gaping maws, Lucy was instantly knocked to the ground and disappeared from sight, swiftly followed by a fighting Sergeant Ridge.
‘Lucy!’ screamed Andrews, barely heard over the sound of panicked and erratic rifle fire.
For the briefest of moments, Ridge’s screaming face reappeared amongst the mass of clawing hands with two blackened fingers hooked into the side of his open mouth. As the skin of his face stretched and finally tore, a chunk of bloody flesh was torn free and Ridge was once again swallowed up by the hungry horde of Dead men, women, and children.
‘Fall back! Fall back!’ shouted Patrick, grabbing Imran who was frantically firing arrows into wave of the Dead still spilling through the open doorway.
Imran looked over at Liz struggling with a distraught Andrews, trying to pull him back from the approaching murderous throng, and darted across to help her, swiftly grabbing one of the soldier’s confiscated rifles from the pile at his feet.
‘She’s gone!’ he shouted in Andrews’ face as he spun him around to look at him. ‘She’s gone! We’ve got to get out of here! Now!’
Thrusting the weapon into the soldier’s hands, Imran grabbed Liz and pushed her in the direction they would need to flee.
‘Go!’ he shouted over the unbearably loud moaning of the Dead.
Now that she was no longer trying to stop Andrews from running to this death in an attempt to save the already doomed Lucy, Liz deftly clicked free her long blade. She glanced over to the other two soldiers and was relieved to see that Patrick had returned to them the means to save their own lives, and even now, corpses were dropping with well-aimed bullets rendering their heads to little more than rotten pulp. But no matter how many of the Dead fell, more and more swarmed through the door to take their place. This battle was lost, Liz could clearly see it. Their only option was to run, so run they would.
‘Steve! Karen,’ Patrick shouted. ‘We need to go!’
Karen risked a glance over her shoulder and nodded, pulling on the back of Steve’s jacket as she began to back up.
‘Time to bug out, Soldier!’ she yelled in his ear, waving at the other two soldiers to follow them.
With the soldiers taking a few final shots at the closest of the Dead, they turned and ran.
‘This way!’ yelled Patrick, pausing at a path that wound its way further into the dome.
Waving the others past him, Patrick was horrified to see that the waves of the Dead were only four or five metres behind the tall muscular soldier who was stopping every so often to turn and fire into the crowd.
‘Just run!’ Patrick shouted, darting forward to pull the soldier along. ‘There’s too many, our only chance is to outrun them!’
As the soldier turned to him, Patrick was shocked to see not the face of a hardened soldier looking back at him, but the scared face of a young man who looked barely out of his teens.
‘Just follow the others!’ Patrick yelled, pushing the young man ahead of him.
With the group now running blindly along the cobbled pathways, with countless Dead on their heels, Liz knew that they had to find a way out soon, or it would be the end for all of them. Sprinting by something that looked like it may have been some sort of souvenir stand set in a slightly wider section of the path, Liz almost ran past the one thing that could save them. As the partly covered sign flashed by in the corner of her eye, she only just registered what it was in time. Skidding to a halt as the other sped by her, Liz ran over to the Perspex protected map similar to the one they had found outside.
‘Wait!’ she yelled, pushing aside the glossy leaves of an exotic creeper she could not name.
Hearing her call, all but Grimes and Sinclair stopped immediately. Terrified of what was behind them, the two soldiers carried on running as if the very hounds of hell were behind them.
‘Sinclair!’ shouted Andrews, seeing his two comrades disappearing round a corner with no idea of where they were going.
With the moaning of the Dead increasing in volume, Liz knew they were closing the gap. She didn’t have long. So with her fingers shaking, she located her position on the map and frantically looked for a possible escape route.
‘Fuck!’ she swore, hitting the sign in anger.
The only exits were back the way they had come, and with the first of the Dead already dragging their rancid bodies into the opened up area, it did not look good. It was then that she noticed that on the far side of the dome, a tunnel that had been labelled ‘the link’, led to the second larger ‘Rainforest’ biome. It was a long shot, but with time running out, they didn’t have many options left open to them. Perhaps the Gods would be looking kindly down on them and they would find a way out of the second dome. Of course, what they did once they were outside, was another problem altogether.
‘This way!’ Liz shouted, pointing along a second path diverting from the main pathway.
‘What about Grimes and Sinclair?’ asked Andrews, looking nervously back up along the path the two men had just taken.
‘If we want to get out of here alive, we need to go this way, and now!’ commanded Liz, her eyes flicking to Imran as he suddenly aimed at something behind her.
She trusted Imran with her life, and as the arrow whistled past her, she didn’t even flinch.
‘Whatever we’re doing, we need to do it now, people,’ said Steve, his rifle once again raised, as he began to back up along the path that Liz had indicated. ‘We’ve got company, lots of it!’
Liz glanced back over her shoulder and her heart sank. The Dead, desperate to follow the living flesh that had just escaped them, were no longer restricting their movement just to the pathways, and were now clambering and clawing their way through the overgrown foliage to get into the area.
‘Shit!’ Phil whispered, shifting Charlie to one arm so he could retrieve a large knife from his hip.
‘We’re leaving!’ Shouted Patrick, his tone telling them the decision had been made, not that with the Dead now only a few metres away, they needed much encouragement.
Andrews knew to wait any longer would certainly mean a violent and bloody death, so with a final glance after Sinclair and Grimes, he turned, shot the corpse of a Dead teenage girl in the face, and ran.
***
‘Sinclair!’ panted Grimes, leaning against a twisted tree as he bent over trying to gulp down air. ‘Wait, Sinclair, we’ve lost the others, they’re… they’re not behind us.’
Sinclair turned and looked back along the path behind them. Grimes was right, they were on their own.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ said Sinclair, the k
nuckles of his fist nervously thumping the side of his head, as he turned in circles, unsure of what they should do.
‘Do we go back?’ he asked Grimes, hoping the evidently more intelligent man could tell him what to do. ‘Do we try to find them or what?’
‘This place is huge and these paths are like a fucking maze.’ Grimes replied, finally pushing himself away from the tree. ‘If we go back, the only thing we’ll know for certain, is that we’ll find those fucking corpses. I think we keep going forward and try to find a way out of this place.’
‘Right, yeah, okay, then that’s the plan,’ said Sinclair, glad that the decision had been made for him. ‘We get out of here and leave all this shit behind that’s the plan, we stick together and get out of here.’
‘Yeah,’ answered Grimes, looking curiously up at the big man, hoping he wasn’t about to have some sort of breakdown, ‘come on, we’d better go, they’re getting closer.’
The two men who had become soldiers by chance, rather than choice, tried not to look back at the rustling leaves only a few metres away. They did not need to see these corpses, hungry for flesh, to know they were dangerously close. The rise in the volume of their constant moaning gave them away.
‘Which way now?’ asked Sinclair, looking hopefully at Grimes, when they came to a split in the pathway.
‘Erm…’ he replied, nervously turning his head left and right, knowing any error could cost them their life.
‘This way,’ he finally said, starting off along the left hand path. ‘If we can get to the perimeter of the dome, we’ve got more chance of finding another door.’
With both of them feeling a little better now that a plan of action had been formed, they began to jog along the winding cobbled path, hoping that once they reached the walls of the dome, they could follow the curve round to a door of some sort. It was hardly a tactical master plan, but with the Dead behind them and no obvious way to escape them, it was all they had.
Suddenly, two corpses tumbled through an overgrown explosion of geraniums that had formed a curtain of green and pink hanging down from a bridge over the path.
‘Jesus!’ cried Grimes, almost walking into the arms of a Dead man with only the thinnest layers of rotten flesh still left on his face.
The creature seemed equally surprised to find Grimes within arm’s reach, but once the realisation had somehow managed to permeate its fetid brain, it darted forward, mouth agape. Jumping back from the snapping jaws that threatened to end his life in the most horrible of ways, Grimes only just managed to bring his rifle up in time. But when all he received for pulling the trigger was an ineffectual ‘click’ of an empty magazine, his eyes widened in terror. The man’s corpse would not be denied his mouthful of warm bloody flesh, and as he continued to press himself forward, his skeletal hands latched onto Grimes’ shoulders.
‘Fuck! Get it off me! Sinclair, get it off me!’ screamed Grimes, struggling as the stench of the cadaver made his stomach turn and eyes water.
Now that there was something practical for him to do, something that he understood, Sinclair sprang into action. Leaping forward, he grabbed the second corpse, which may have also once been a man, by the front of its gore stained skirt and threw it to the ground behind him. With only the cadaver that Grimes still struggled with needing immediate attention, Sinclair pulled the large machete from the sheath on his thigh, and sent the blade swinging overhand into the top of its skull. With a sickening ‘crack’, the blade lodged itself deeply into the corpse’s skull, and with Sinclair’s face setting into a look of severe determination, he flicked his wrist, forcing the crack in the skull wider. Instantly, the man’s corpse shuddered and then became still, his claw like fingers slipping lifelessly from Grimes’ shoulders. Turning to now deal with the second cadaver, Sinclair was surprised to see that it had made no effort to either right itself, or drag itself closer to the living flesh so clearly in sight. Placing one foot either side of the rancid corpse, Sinclair swiftly changed his hold on the machete, and was about to plunge it down to end the life of the thing at his feet, when he noticed the hungry glare no longer burned behind its film covered eyes. The corpse was already truly dead.
‘Grimes?’ he said, confused by what he was seeing.
‘Come on,’ said Grimes, pulling on Sinclair’s arm, ‘we’ve got to go, there’s more coming.’
‘But…’ Sinclair started to say, tearing his eyes from the body at his feet.
The sight of the approaching throng of decaying corpses that had caught up with them, soon banished any other thoughts from his mind.
‘Fucking hell!’ he whispered, his eyes darting from one hideous abomination to the next.
‘Sinclair!’ Grimes shouted, breaking the man from his terrified trance.
Shaking himself, Sinclair left the riddle of the motionless corpse unanswered and ran with Grimes, under the bridge, and along the cobbled path on the other side. They had hardly gone twenty metres when the corpse of a woman dressed only in a torn and dirt streaked dressing gown, suddenly stepped into their path as they rounded a corner.
‘Got it!’ Sinclair said, barely breaking his stride, as he removed her head with one mighty swing of his machete.
As her decapitated body crumpled to the ground, Sinclair flicked his machete, sending the filth that was smeared almost up to the handle, flying off in an arc of rancid fluid.
‘Here, take this,’ Sinclair said, quickly pulling his rifle off from his shoulder and handing it to Grimes as they continued to run. ‘You’re out of ammo and I can use my machete just as easily.’
‘Thanks,’ said Grimes, tossing into a large flowering bush his rifle that had now become little more than a dead weight.
It took the men a few minutes of running, but by pure luck, the path they had chosen actually ran very close to the outer wall of the dome. With only the width of an overgrown flowerbed between them and the outer wall, they knew at last that they had a chance of finding a way out.
‘Through here,’ said Grimes, urgently pushing through a patch of gnarled grape vines, ‘there’s a small gap between the plants and the wall. It’s our best bet for finding a way out and the plants may just give us some cover.’
‘And if we do find a way out,’ Sinclair asked, nervously looking through the grimy hexagonal panelled wall, ‘what then?’
‘Then we stick to original plan and try to make our way to the bay, it can’t be that far. We’ll make it, I promise.’ Grimes unconvincingly replied, glancing back as he started to edge along the inside of the wall.
As the two men walked as stealthily as they could along the narrow channel, the loud moaning of the hungry cadavers within the dome was a constant reminder they were far from safe, and far from alone. With every snap of a twig or rustle of leaves, Grimes would raise his rifle expectantly, nervously awaiting the abomination he knew was surely about to pounce. But so far, the corpses had been thankfully unaware of their presence, and despite the groaning echoing back and forth about the dome, Grimes was sure that with each step, they were moving further away from the bulk of the horde. With Sinclair close behind him, Grimes also kept a close eye for any movement from the other side of the wall. After all, there would be no point escaping the dome, only to be met with another crowd of corpses that had simply followed their progress along the clear panels to an exit.
When an exit finally presented itself to them, it was so well hidden that they almost walked right past it.
‘Hey,’ said Sinclair, grabbing hold of Grimes’ shoulder, ‘look at this.’
Turning back, Grimes saw what Sinclair had noticed. There, along one of the panels at the base of the wall, was a large fracture running through the thick internal sheet of Perspex. More importantly though, the outer layer had not only mirrored this crack, but part of it had fallen out completely, providing them with a possible, but quite small, way out of the dome.
‘You think you can get these screws out?’ asked Grimes, running his hands along the metal frame of the
panel, as he looked up at Sinclair.
‘Erm,’ replied Sinclair, rummaging through his pockets until he found a small penknife, ‘yes.’
Placing his machete at his feet, Sinclair knelt down, and after selecting a certain blade from his penknife, began to get to work on the screws locking the smaller section of the broken panel in place.
‘I hope I can fit through that gap in the outer layer,’ he mumbled, dropping the first of the removed screws to the ground. ‘It looks like it’s smaller than the one on this side.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ replied Grimes, nervously looking from Sinclair’s wide shoulders to the hole he would need to fit through, ‘it’ll be a tight squeeze, but you should make it.’
‘And if I can’t?’ Sinclair asked, pausing to turn and look at Grimes.
‘Sinclair, Christ, you’ve saved my life more than once today. I’m not going to leave you behind, okay?’ Grimes replied, reaching out to lay his hand on the obviously concerned man’s shoulder. ‘We’ll just find another way out.’
‘Yeah, alright, Grimes,’ said Sinclair, laughing with relief as he brushed away Grimes’ hand from his shoulder, ‘don’t go all queer on me now.’
Grimes simply rolled his eyes and was about to say something, when the sound of a short burst of gunfire erupted from somewhere within the dome. The two men looked at each other, their emotions conflicted. On the one hand, they wished they still had the safety that the group offered, but on the other, they were glad to have separated, as the others were obviously still battling for their lives with the horde.
‘At least we know they’re still alive,’ said Sinclair, removing another screw from the framework.
‘Hmm, for now,’ Grimes muttered under his breath, his eyes searching the nearby foliage for any signs that the cadavers had also found them.
Ten anxious minutes later, and Sinclair had finally worked free the last screw holding the broken panel in place.
‘Hmm...’ he pondered leaning forward as he wondered why the free section of the hexagonal panel hadn’t simply fallen out, ‘perhaps…’
Lanherne Chronicles (Book 3): Last Days With The Dead Page 28
