Lanherne Chronicles (Book 3): Last Days With The Dead

by Stephen Charlick

  ‘I love you...’ she simply replied, taking his hand up to her lips.

  ‘Together then,’ Imran said softly, looking into Liz’s eyes.

  ‘Together,’ she echoed, choking back the tears that threatened to fall as she quickly stepped into his arms, feeling his heart beating against her chest just one last time.

  ‘They’re coming!’ screamed Karen, her eyes wide with fear.

  Time had run out for them all, the Dead had reached the observation platform. Instantly, Liz let go of Imran’s hand, both so he could fire the few arrows he had left, and to give her the freedom of movement she needed to wield her sword.

  ‘Here, take him!’ said Phil urgently, spinning Karen around to drop Charlie in her arms. ‘Stay behind me for as long as you can, okay!’

  Karen, her own neck already bloody from her earlier wound, clutched Charlie close to her chest and nodded. This is why she had come. This was why Matt had died. This child she now held in her arms, this stolen child so cruelly snatched from its loving mother, this was the child she would now die for.

  ‘Right, stick close! Steve, Andrews, time to make those bullets count!’ shouted Patrick over the alarmingly loud moaning, while the group began to edge forward to their probable deaths.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…’ Andrews repeated under his breath over and over again, as each step brought them closer to the Dead that even now, were excitedly spilling out onto the platform.

  When it came down to it, it was hard to tell whether it was the Dead man dressed in a gore encrusted suit with half of his face missing, or the woman with the chunk of flesh missing from her grey tinged neck that actually reached them first. Not that it mattered, as both were swiftly dispatched by one double swing of Phil’s hefty club. Their shattered and misshapen heads that had been almost torn from their shoulders by the force of the blow, hung momentarily to one side, before their cadaverous bodies slumped to the floor, where they were stepped over as the group finally met the bulk of the horde head on.

  ‘Get ready!’ Shouted Patrick, as the wave of the Dead finally slammed into them.

  Instantly, they were engulfed by a sea of clawing hands and snapping jaws, but somehow the group managed to be keeping the throng at bay. Precious bullets tore through rotten mould covered faces, heavy clubs shattered skulls and blades slashed, dropping reaching limbs left and right.

  ‘We need to move forward!’ shouted Patrick, barely having time to think, as yet another corpse slammed into him, it’s open mouth a putrid pit of compulsive desire.

  ‘Stay together!’ cried Phil, who was using the lifeless shell of a Dead woman as a shield against the manic swarm. ‘Move as one! Don’t let them get between us!’

  Behind him, he could feel Karen’s body twisting and turning, mirroring his every movement so that she, and more importantly, the precious cargo in her arms were shielded by his bulk.

  ‘Karen, stay with me!’ he shouted over his shoulder, pulling his club from the crushed remains of a Dead woman’s head. ‘Stay between me and Liz!’

  He knew of all of them, Liz’s skill with her sword was Karen and Charlie’s best defence. Though just how long she could keep up her wild attack on the Dead, was anyone’s guess, she would tire eventually, as would they all, and then it would really be over.

  ‘I’m out!’ cried Steve, the chamber of his rifle clicking empty. ‘We need to get the fuck out of here!’

  With limited options left open to him, Steve flipped his rifle over, and ignoring the searing pain of his hands burning on the hot metal of the barrel, started to use its butt as a club. To each of them it seemed like they had been battling the Dead for an eternity, but in reality, it had barely been a few minutes, such was the all-consuming horror as they fought for their survival. They had barely moved a few metres towards the staircase, before they knew if they didn’t make ground soon, the pressure of the Dead on all sides would simply hold them in place. This spot, miles from home and so far from those they loved, this spot would be the place they finally met their ends.

  Andrews fired twice more, reducing the faces of two Dead men to dark rotten pulp. But such was the press of the Dead behind them that the now lifeless corpses, simply stayed upright, their withered bodies simply unable to fall to the ground. Andrews knew his ammo supply was running dangerously low, and when finally he too felt the click of an empty chamber, the dread that had settled in the pit of his stomach twisted and burned into a blaze of pure panic.

  ‘I’m out!’ he cried, trying to use the length of his rifle to shove the Dead back, ‘I’m fucking out of ammo! Fuck! We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to get the fuck out of here!’

  In his panic, he committed the cardinal sin when battling against the Dead, he lost control. Blindly lashing out with the butt of his rifle, he did not see the Dead girl manically clawing her way through between the two lifeless corpses still held upright, that is, not until it was too late. With an almost excited demonic glee, her small hooked fingers latched onto his bicep, and using his own weight against him, used this handhold to pull her open jaws toward his arm. With a terrified cry, Andrews noticed the Dead girl, her mouth seconds away from clamping down, and tried desperately to shake her free. With his attention now solely on the jaws so close to ripping into the flesh of his arm, it didn’t take long for the other Dead to press their advantage. Before he knew what was happening, multiple decaying hands grabbed hold of him, and as one, they began to pull him towards them. Suddenly, a vision born of the darkest of nightmares darted its emaciated and maggot ridden head forward and clamped down on Andrews’ neck. For a split second, Andrews gasped, freezing on the spot, the realisation of what was happening turning his bowels to ice, and then as broken and putrid teeth began to bear down to puncture his skin, he began to scream.

  ‘Andrews!’ screamed Karen, as a spray of warm blood erupted from his neck to rain down on the grateful open mouths of the Dead.

  With blood on their faces, the Dead around Andrews knew their time had come, and as the life pumped out of his convulsing body, they pounced. With the ferocity of a pack of starving hyenas, Dead hands and teeth tore into Andrews, ripping free chunks of flesh to fill their putrid stomachs.

  Liz’s sword slashed upwards through the chin of a Dead woman, her green flesh only barely hanging on to her bones, piercing her skull cavity from underneath and sending her to the oblivion she deserved. Pushing the woman’s corpse back into the crowd, she tried not to look to her left where Private Andrews was being quickly torn to pieces, but continued to slash again and again at the Dead hands reaching for her. With every swipe of her blade, limbs would fall cold and lifeless to her feet, but even so, the gap between her and the Dead was getting smaller and smaller. She knew before very long, there wouldn’t even be enough space left to use her sword effectively, and like Imran, whose bow was useless in such close quarter attacks, she would have to resort to using just her hunting knife. Thinking of him, she itched to make sure he was okay, so after kicking out at a Dead man with a blackened gaping hole where his left eye and much of the flesh of his cheek should be, she risked the briefest of glances in his direction. Imran was just pulling his knife from the temple of a Dead man, and as the thick rancid fluid splashed over his hand, Liz’s heart seemed to stop in her chest. For there, reaching past the shoulders of the now truly dead man to meet Imran’s extended arm with her opening jaws, was an exceptionally tall Dead woman.

  ‘Imran!’ she cried, using the body of the man he had just dispatched for leverage to leap up to knock the Dead woman’s jaw aside.

  As her fist connected with the jaw, the Dead woman’s head suddenly snapped to one side, but no real damage had been done, and although the Dead had begun to already paw at her back, Liz could not let Imran be harmed. So, with a scream of rage, she yanked the back of her jacket from the Dead hands behind her, and lunged again at the tall Dead woman who even now, was darting back to Imran. But the Dead woman suddenly faltered in her movements, the decaying
muscles of her face becoming slack and nonresponsive, causing her jaw to fall lifelessly to one side. Then with a strange choking sound, her head unexpectedly flopped forward to momentarily rest on her chest, before her body dropped, lifelessly, to join the other corpses at Imran’s feet. Briefly, Liz’s eyes met Imran, his confusion mirroring her own.

  A scream from Karen, shook Liz from the moment, and spinning, she saw Karen holding Charlie with one arm, while she frantically stabbed alternately between the face of the Dead man in front of her, and one that had snaked its way through its fallen brethren to grab hold of her leg. Then, just like with the tall woman, the Dead man pulling his face eagerly forward to take a bite from Karen’s thigh, inexplicably stopped. One second, he was a living abomination, an unnatural plague on mankind, and the next, he was just as he should be, a corpse. Confused, Liz’s eyes darted out over the crowd, her gaze flitted from one decaying visage to the next. It was only when she knew what she was looking for that sure enough, she could see more and more of the Dead suddenly halting in their pursuit of the living, only to succumb to the true death that had eluded them for so long.

  ‘What the fuck’s happening?’ shouted Steve, pushing aside two Dead men whose unnatural life force had suddenly fled their decaying muscles.

  ‘They’re dying! They’re finally fucking dying!’ shouted Phil, pulling the end of his spiked club from the skull of a Dead woman, while next to her, one of her Dead brethren simply fell to the floor, lifeless.

  ‘Imran,’ said Liz, her hand reaching for his arm as three, and then four more of the Dead in front of them dropped, their bodies transformed from instruments of death, to little more than a collection of rotting flesh on sun bleached bones.

  Then, as if by some unseen chain reaction, another fell, then another, and another, and soon more and more of the Dead were letting go of the unnatural life the man-made virus had forced upon them. Bit by bit, the volume of the moaning began to decrease, only to be replaced by the almost constant thump of body landing on body, as the Dead dropped lifelessly to the floor. With the Dead horde now thinning with each second that passed, the group simply had to clamber over the piles of bodies to dispatch the few that remained standing. Even these seemed to be slower and more laboured in their movements than usual, and some even gave themselves over to the darkness of death by the time Patrick, Phil, or Liz, finally managed to reach them. And as the last of the Dead on the platform fell to Liz’s sword, she looked over at Steve, who was standing at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Just a sea of bodies all the way down,’ he whispered, turning from the stairs to meet her gaze, ‘they’re all dead, they’re all really dead.’

  With hope blossoming in her chest, Liz turned and began to climb over the mound of corpses to get to the handrail.

  ‘Liz?’ Imran asked, watching the woman he loved frantically wade through the corpses to get to the edge of the platform.

  Looking down at the dome spread out before her, Liz’s hand rose to her mouth as she choked back a sob of relief. For there, dotted along every path below her, were motionless, lifeless, and more importantly, truly dead bodies. Slowly, she turned back to Imran, the heavy tears of joy already falling from her eyes.

  ‘Imran,’ she whispered through her tears, all of the group suddenly looking expectantly at her, ‘it’s over, Imran, it’s finally over, they’re… they’re gone.’

  EPILOGUE

  SIX YEARS LATER

  ‘Charlie, take this to Steve and the others,’ said Alice, wiping her hands on her apron, as she handed her son a basket overflowing with chunks of bread and wedges of cheese, ‘but wait for Steve to stop the tractor, and don’t get too close, and don’t drop it!’

  The young boy looked up at his mother through the deep brown eyes that mirrored his long lost father and smiled.

  ‘Yes, mum,’ he replied, taking the food before turning to clamber over the already ploughed section of the convent’s north field.

  ‘And come straight back, they’re busy, they don’t need you pestering them,’ Alice called after the fleeing boy, who simply waved back at her.

  As she watched the small boy, who had become her whole world, gleefully running towards Steve and the others in the field, she thought back to the time she had almost lost him, and an involuntary shiver ran down her spine.

  ‘Someone walk over your grave?’ asked Liz, sitting next to her, watching Saleana trying to spoon feed her infant brother, Elijah, a cold mash of apples and pears.

  ‘What? Oh, sorry,’ Alice replied, forcing a smile as she turned to the woman she loved as a sister, ‘just remembering, you know, just how close I came to losing him, that’s all.’

  Liz leant forward, helped her daughter wipe the excess fruit puree from Elijah’s happily grinning face, and nodded back at Alice.

  When the group had left the tropical dome, with its pathways littered with the lifeless corpses of the Dead, they had stepped out into a world forever changed, or rather, to a world suddenly changed back.

  They had come across Grimes trying to support the bulk of his friend, Sinclair, the two of them hobbling along a corpse-strewn road just beyond the Eden complex. Sinclair’s right calf had been savaged in an attack, and even as the cart pulled to a stop alongside them, he had fainted for a second time from blood loss. The group of survivors didn’t mind being squashed together in the cart, as they travelled along the twisting and overgrown country lanes back to Lanherne, they were simply happy to be alive, and to find the decaying remains of the Dead lying wherever they had fallen. With each corner Samson pulled the cart round, they expected to find the Dead wandering just as they had done for the last eight years, in search of warm bloody flesh to feast upon. But they didn’t, and with each turn, their spirits rose higher and higher, and more importantly, they even dared to hope. It was not until the high stonewalls of Lanherne finally came into view, and they still had not come across any of Dead that were anything more than piles of lifeless flesh clothed in tattered rags, that they truly allowed this hope to bloom.

  ‘It reached critical mass! It reached critical mass!’ Avery had cried over and over again, joyously waving his arms as he ran down the tree lined lane outside the convent toward the cart.

  In a babble of scientific terms and overflowing with an almost tearful joy, the group had managed to glean from Avery that the new virus had mutated from Charlie to become airborne. It had reached such a density within the atmosphere that it actively began to attack the original virus hidden deep within the tissues of the Dead, effectively curing them and restoring this flesh back to its natural lifeless state. However, when he saw the bandaged leg of Sinclair, and Karen’s patched up ear, his smile faltered.

  ‘When were you bitten?’ he had asked, his face once more full of medical interest and concern as he checked Karen’s ear for infection.

  ‘Just before it all happened, but that was over two days ago now,’ she had replied, knowing if there was a chance she was going to turn, she would have done so by now.

  ‘It’s an unknown factor, reintroducing the original virus into those already cured,’ he had said, carefully reapplying her bandage. ‘I assume whatever was going to happen, would have manifested itself by now, so I guess you’re both okay.’

  ‘Probably a genetic mutation,’ he had later explained when Grimes got round to telling him of the Dead girl he and Sinclair had seen with a bite mark on her arm. ‘The fact that she only had signs of a bite, rather than that she died from physical trauma or blood loss, indicates she was unable to fight off the introduction of a new infection, but as Karen and Private Sinclair managed it, I’d say her particular mutation must’ve been quite rare.’

  So the Dead had effectively been eradicated from their lives. No longer would the living live in fear of feeling the rancid touch of Dead hands upon their skin. The nightmare of the Death-walker plague was finally over and they were free.

  It was with this newfound freedom that the survivors entered nearby towns, collecting treasu
res thought forever lost to them, petrol being one the most prized of their finds. With more than enough fuel for their meagre needs, those at Lanherne could finally run generators, to give them light and keep them warm in winter, as well as run the tractor that even now, Steve was using to plough the fields for planting.

  Liz looked out across the field where Steve had just pulled the tractor to a stop and jumped down to greet Charlie, struggling with the large basket. Behind him, Gabe, Phil, Leon, Karen, Cam, and Penny, had been clearing the already toiled soil of stones and weeds by hand, and even from a distance, Liz could tell each and every one of them, though engrossed in their tedious but necessary work, welcomed the chance of a break. Tossing aside their sacks of collected weeds, they each mopped their brows or stretched their aching muscles, before slowly making their way over to Steve and the basket of food. Trailing behind Phil and the others, Liz watched as Gabe bent over conscientiously to pull one last unwanted item from the soil. Suddenly, he snapped back up, clutching his hand tightly to his chest and began to stamp furiously at something in the soil. Confused, Liz slowly stood, her hand rising to shield her eyes from the bright morning sun, as she watched as Gabe looked sheepishly about, before briskly walking away from the others, over to the side of the field.

  ‘Saleana, take care of your brother for a moment,’ Liz said, slowly stepping away from the felled tree on which they were having their lunch, ‘Mum just needs to go talk to Gabe for a bit, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ replied Saleana, trying to get another spoonful of mashed fruit into her struggling brother’s mouth.

  ‘Liz?’ asked Alice, wondering why she was so desperate to speak with Gabe all of a sudden.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she replied, forcing a smile.

  Something about what she had seen itched at the back of her mind, and if the horrors she had endured in the past had taught her one thing, it was that if you had an itch, you scratched it.