Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead (39 page)

‘Oh my God! Oh, my God!’ the young man panted, clawing himself from under the lifeless weight still on top of him and out across the bloody floor.

‘Finish him, Tom,’ came his wife’s ghostly voice. ‘He’s been bitten… you know what that means…’

‘Yes, finish him, Daddy,’ the voice of his eldest daughter urged. ‘You can’t let him come back…’

‘Oh, my God, please… please help me!’ The young man sobbed, cradling his left arm as he tried to sit up.

‘You have to,’ his wife demanded.

‘P… Please h… help me…’ he continued, his breath ragged as his body began to go into shock.

Stepping over to the terrified and bloody young man, Tom dropped to his knees and looked into a pair of wide eyes, dancing with fear.

‘Do it!’ his wife hissed from somewhere in the back of Tom’s head.

‘I’m… I’m sorry,’ Tom whispered, gently placing one of his sickles on the floor so he could reach out a comforting hand to the scared young man.

‘P… Please…’ the young man sobbed, knowing what time he had left would be filled with unimaginable pain as his body shut down piece by piece.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom repeated, shaking his head as he gave the young man’s head a fatherly stroke.

‘I don’t want to…’ the young man began but his words faulted with a gasp when Tom’s fist suddenly tightened about his hair.

‘It’s for the best,’ Tom whispered, slowly moving his other hand and the sickle it held to a position across his chest.

‘No, please...’ the young man wept, struggling pitifully in Tom’s firm grasp as his panic filled eyes flicked to the curved bloody blade.

‘It’s for the best, son,’ Tom replied. ‘It’s time…’

And with that, Tom’s arm flew out; the blade slicing through the young man’s throat with a backhanded swipe. Unlike the Dead man he had just beheaded, the young man’s heart was still frantically pumping and as the blade cut through the flesh of his throat, severing veins, arteries, muscle and tendon, his blood erupted in a fountain of crimson; splashing across Tom’s chest and face.

For a few seconds the young man pawed pathetically at Tom, his mouth opening and closing in shock, as his life-blood gushed out of him but with each second that passed he slipped further and further away from life and into a brief oblivion.

‘Now, Tom,’ Tom’s wife finally whispered. ‘Before he comes back…’

Nodding his agreement, Tom flipped the position of the sickle in his hand and swung the blade at the young man’s neck again. Whereas the first cut had been to prevent his prolonged suffering, this second swipe was to finish the job, permanently; and as the metal, already slick with blood, cut through the final remnants of flesh attaching the head to the body Tom wished the young man a speedy journey to his maker.

Sitting there drenched in blood, Tom lowered the young man’s severed head to the floor, pointedly ignoring the already film covered eyes that stared hungrily back at him and looked at the carnage lying about him.

Suddenly from back the way he had originally come, he heard the unmistakable calls of the Dead and with their desperate moans echoing along the hallways to greet him Tom knew his work here was not yet done. So, after reaching over to grasp the second sickle that now sat in a pool of cooling blood, Tom pushed himself up from his knees with a ‘grunt’.

‘They’re coming, Daddy,’ his youngest daughter whispered.

‘I know, sweetheart,’ he muttered back, simultaneously flicking both of his blades outwards to send twin arcs of blood dotting up the walls.

‘Tom!’ cried a woman’s voice.

‘Kill them Tom,’ his wife’s hissed. ‘Cut them to pieces…’

‘Yes, cut them, Daddy, cut them up,’ chanted his daughters in unison.

‘Tom!’ the woman cried again.

Then Tom felt the hand on his shoulder and he spun, his blades raised high, ready to strike.

‘No!’ Fran screamed, automatically throwing her arms up to protect herself.

‘Kill…’ his wife began to whisper.

‘Tom! It’s me,’ Fran shrieked, desperate to break through to the man lost to his mania. ‘It’s me…’

Confusion visibly flitted across Tom’s face as his mind fought to piece together what he was seeing but then, as if in a blink of an eye, reality claimed him and he could see the terror in Fran’s eyes.

‘Jesus, Fran… I…’ he began to apologise, slowly lowering his blades as the voices of his family returned to a distant background murmur.

‘There’s no time,’ she interrupted, just grateful the man was back in the here and now before any real damage had been done. ‘Come on, we’ve got to move…’ 

Glancing over his shoulder, Tom instantly knew what Fran meant. There, pushing past one another in their eagerness to reach the living flesh suddenly within their sights, was a horde of advancing cadavers.

‘Fuck!’ he gasped, realising if it hadn’t been for Fran he would have be torn to pieces.

‘We need to go… now!’ Fran repeated, pulling urgently on Tom’s arm.

With a nod, Tom turned and after stepping over the two decapitated bodies at his feet, began to run alongside Fran down the hallway.

‘Where’s Carmella and her baby?’ he panted, as he and Fran darted past a large empty classroom. ‘Sally said you’d gone to get her…’

‘She’s… she’s gone,’ she replied, barely breaking her stride while images of Carmella’s cold cadaver reaching out for her flashed into her mind, ‘the baby too…’

‘Shit,’ Tom cursed, shaking his head. ‘Poor little mite…’

Knowing she had enough horrific real memories of her own in her head as it was, Fran was determined not to conjure up imagined scenarios of little Vincenzo’s demise.

‘Yes,’ she simply replied, hoping they could leave talk of Carmella and her baby for when they didn’t have their own impending death barely a few metres behind them.

‘Which way now?’ Tom asked, skidding to a halt at an intersection where an old trophy cabinet proudly displayed dusty silver cups celebrating long forgotten victories.

‘Erm,’ said Fran, glancing left and right along two indistinguishable hallways. ‘I don’t know, I’ve got a bit turned around…’

‘Well we’d better make a decision and fast,’ said Tom, looking back the way they had come at the advancing Dead throng.

‘Crap!’ Fran spat, trying to visually place her position in the school to work out which way they should go.

Just then she caught movement along the hallway to her right.

‘Decision made,’ she suddenly said, grabbing Tom’s arm as she nodded to the bloody cadaver of a Dead man, shambling towards them as fast as his stiff lifeless limbs would carry him, ‘we’re going left.’

She was about to begin running again when she suddenly stopped.

‘Hang on a sec…’ she said, darting back to the display case.

‘What the fuck are you doing!’ called Tom, eyeing the man’s corpse that was closing the gap between them with each second that passed. ‘Come on…’

‘I need…’ she replied, pausing to take a step back before landing a hard kick at the cabinet doors, smashing the ancient glass front, ‘a weapon,’ she continued, reaching past the shattered glass to retrieve a black marble award carved into the shape of obelisk.

Testing the balance of her newly found stone club, Fran was pleased the way the reassuring weight felt in her hand and with a final glance at the Dead man, now only a few metres away, she darted back to Tom’s side.

‘Happy now?’ said Tom, nodding to the marble club the length of her forearm as they jogged along a dim corridor.

‘Much better,’ she replied with a smile, despite the ominous moaning of the Dead behind them seeming to grow as they continued their relentless pursuit. ‘I’m not one for playing the damsel in distress; I like to be able to take care of myself.’

‘No shit,’ he grinned back, as they turned a corner and with that the smile instantly fell from his lips.

Purely by chance they had found the large hallway with the glass domed ceiling through which Kyle had originally led them yesterday. This in itself would have been a moment of relief for them both if it wasn’t for the fact that the space was now crammed with the Dead.

‘Fuck!’ Tom muttered, realising they were trapped; twenty pairs of Dead eyes slowly turning in their direction.

***

‘You!’ Kyle barked, his body shaking from the rage he barely contained. ‘What the fuck have you done?’

Liz looked at the man and knew of all the unholy creatures she had fought this day, perhaps he was the most dangerous. She could see his hate for her consuming him and even though she had the upper hand when it came to combat, Kyle’s rage made him unpredictable. Sparing a quick glance to the knife in his hand, his knuckles turning white with the force of his grip, she looked back into a face contorted and transformed with loathing.

‘Did you really think you could treat people like play things, Kyle, manipulating them to make this place into some sick utopia and not have it come back to bite you on the arse at some point?’ she asked, slowly moving her sword into a defensive position.

‘You stupid bitch!’ he snapped. ‘You have no idea what I did for these people, I kept them alive. I gave order to their lives when the world fell to shit. I… me… I put things right, I did what had to be done… They’d be out there like the rest of those rotting corpses if it wasn’t for me…’

‘But at what cost, Kyle?’ she replied, wondering if Kyle even knew what he had become.

‘Cost? These morons owe me their lives,’ he spat. ‘I don’t give a fuck if they like it, they owe me… they laughed at me before, all of them. They made me the brunt of their jokes, I was just Zak’s geeky brother but… but look at them now, they’re mine, I can get them do whatever I wanted and…’

‘These are people, Kyle, not things for you to use to make up for your crappy life…,’ she began to reply.

‘I don’t care!’ he shouted, his face reddening as he teetered on the brink of losing what little control he had left. ‘Don’t you get it, they’re nothing! They don’t matter!’

‘You’re insane,’ she muttered, her voice a whisper as she slowly shook her head back and forth.

‘And then you and your friends had to turn up and ruin it all,’ he continued.

‘Us?’ she replied, the word coming out as almost a laugh. ‘You thought you had everyone right where you wanted them, right under your thumb… and in the end it was the one person you thought you had totally beaten that turned on you… It was Porrow that did all this, not us. It was Porrow that could see what this place had really become… and it broke him… you and your sick regime broke him.’

‘Porrow?’ Kyle replied, a hint of confusion flitting across his face. ‘But…’

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a figure barrelled into Liz, sending her sword flying out of her grasp and skittering across the floor; it was Parker, he had finally found his quarry. With a scream of shock escaping her lips, the Dead man pulled her to the ground with an animalistic growl.

‘Shit!’ she heard Kyle hiss, as out of the corner of her eye she saw him begin to back away.

‘No!’ Liz cried, desperately fighting to keep Parker’s snapping jaws away from her face.

Her hands slipped across a neck slick with cold sticky blood and with all her might she wedged her thumbs into the flesh beneath his jaw.

‘Enjoy your death, Bitch!’ she heard Kyle laugh over Parker’s savage growls. ‘I know I will!’

And then with a sound of running footsteps he left her to her fate.

Knowing that her sword was well beyond her reach, Liz realised she had only one option and one chance if she wanted to save herself. So, digging the fingers of her left hand as deep into the flesh of the Dead man’s neck as she could, she wrapped her other fist around the arrow still protruding through his neck and pulled. With a cry of determination, Liz felt the bloody arrow slowly begin to move but as Parker struggled to bite her he suddenly twisted his head to the left and with that she felt the shaft of the arrow break inside him.

‘Fuck!’ she screamed, yanking free the broken section in her hand and praying it would be long enough.

With the images of Tyrone, Paul and Abby suddenly flitting through her mind, Liz somehow found some hidden reserve of strength within the shaking muscles of her arms and with a yell of determination, she pushed Parker’s head a fraction further away from her.

‘Fuck you!’ she screamed, stabbing the arrow shaft as hard as she could through a milky film covered eye; just as she had seen Tyrone do.

With a ‘crack’ she felt the thin bone behind the eye shatter beneath the force of her blow and as she cried out again the point ripped through into his brain. For the briefest of moments she feared the arrow hadn’t been long enough to save her but then with a shudder running through his Dead muscles, Parker’s cadaver suddenly became still.

‘Christ…’ she panted, relief flooding through her as she slowly pushed Parker’s dead weight from her.

Lying on her back with her heart racing, Liz gulped down air to feed her protesting muscles the oxygen they craved and only once she was sure she could stand without falling flat on her face she slowly pushed herself up onto her knees before using the wall to pull herself upright.

‘Right,’ she muttered, reaching for her sword with fingers still shaking from the after effects of the adrenalin pumping through her.