Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead (4 page)

‘I think we should try to get down there while we have the chance,’ said Charlie, watching the Dead man sprint off into the darkness.

‘Hmmm…’ replied Tom, wondering just how many of the hungry corpses were roaming the grounds. ‘Before any more company turns up.’

‘Right… Sorry Phil but I need you to go down first,’ said Charlie, turning back to the group. ‘You’re the heaviest and if the drainpipe will hold you, it’ll hold all of us.’

‘Great,’ Phil mumbled, making his way over to the hole in the roof.

Pausing as he ducked to step through the gap, Phil pulled the hunting knife from the sheath on his calf and put the blade between his teeth. If he met with unwanted company when he got to the ground, he wanted to be ready for it. Using one of the exposed beams for support, he slowly edged out onto the roof. As he did so, a final roof tile slipped free to fall and smash on the ground below him.

‘Fucking great,’ he garbled past the knife between his teeth.

The corner of the roof was barely a metre away but Phil was still grateful when his fingers finally latched onto the thicker corner tiles. Now that he had something to grip onto, it was an easy task for him to pull himself over to where the clogged guttering met the sturdy looking drainpipe. Despite the building being quite old, Phil could tell that no corners had been cut in the construction and as he got down on his stomach to lower his legs over the edge of the roof he hoped this had stretched as far as the drainpipe fixings as well. With his legs at last dangling over the lip of the roof, Phil was about to begin his descent when from somewhere in the grounds an owl hooted. Phil froze in his movements and looked back over to the gaping hole in the roof where Charlie held his hand for him to stop. They had all heard this owl before, it was well known to them and as a signal it meant they may just finally have been given a break. Sure enough as Phil hung mid-air craning his neck to see below him, the welcome sight of one of their carts appeared from the darkness of the grounds. With the creaking of its large wheels, the horse drawn cart came to a stop as close to the wall as whoever was driving could manage to get.

‘Phil,’ someone hissed below him. ‘Need a lift?’

Pulling his legs back onto the roof, Phil peered over the edge to see the smiling face of Cam looking up at him through the cart’s open roof hatch some five metres below him.

‘What took you?’ Phil whispered down, smiling, never so relieved to see Cam and the cart being pulled by Snow, one of their trusty old mares.

Cam had been a television journalist for the BBC before the world descended in blood and madness. He had spent those first few weeks reporting the fall of Man one battle against the Dead at a time until there was simply no electricity and more importantly, no one left to watch him.

‘Hang on...’ said Cam, waving before disappearing into the shadows of the cart.

Phil knew what he was doing, Cam was checking through the spy holes in the cart wooden walls for any sign of the Dead so that he didn’t expose himself to milky eyes searching for living flesh to consume. With thankfully nothing but empty darkness in sight Cam reappeared and began to climb up through the roof hatch with a length of rope over his shoulder.

‘Over to Charlie,’ whispered Phil, knowing it would be easier for the others to get down to the cart if they could skip getting to the corner of the roof entirely.

With a nod, Cam took a moment to take aim and tried to toss the rope up to Tom and Charlie waiting by the hole. On the third attempt Tom managed to grab hold of the rope as it flew towards him and once he had taken up the slack, he returned to the shadows of the loft space to tie it off on one of the sturdier looking ceiling beams.   

‘Carmella, we’ll get you down first…’ Began Charlie, pulling the other end of the length of rope up into the loft space. ‘Vincenzo, tie it round her so we can lower her down.’

‘Si, Charlie,’ said Vincenzo, taking the rope and passing under his wife’s arms.

Once the rope was securely tied about Carmella, with Vincenzo’s help she slowly made her way over to the gaping hole in the roof, stepping carefully from one ceiling beam to the next while the Dead raged below them.

‘Ready?’ asked Tom, trying to give the scared woman a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry, the other end of the rope’s tied off… we won’t let you fall. OK.’

With a not very convincing nod, Carmella stepped out onto the roof and began to lower herself to the edge.

‘
Non ti preoccupare, tu sarai al sicuro,
’ Vincenzo whispered, reaching out to give Carmella’s hand a final squeeze as she wriggled her legs over the edge of the guttering.

Charlie knew the man was telling his wife not to worry and as Tom and Vincenzo took the strain, Charlie wrapped the rope around his arm to control her descent. It didn’t take long for Carmella’s feet to finally touch down on the roof of the cart and while Cam released her from the rope she briefly waved reassuringly up at Vincenzo and Charlie before disappearing through the roof hatch.

With Carmella now safely hidden by the walls of the cart, the others began to abseil down the rope to join her. Vincenzo had gone next, followed by Paul, Tyrone and then David, while Phil rather than bother to make his way back from the corner of the roof had decided to climb down the drain pipe after all.

It had all gone smoothly and without incident until Tom had lowered himself over the edge with Anne clinging tightly to his back. With her arms tight about his neck and her legs wrapped about his waist, Anne’s frightened gaze fixed on her sister above her. Tom was still a few metres from the roof of the cart when Charlie suddenly yanked sharply on the rope, warning him of danger. Immediately Tom froze, knowing there was only one danger worth halting their descent for. Slowly moving his head to one side, Tom soon found the cause for concern. There, loping through the darkness towards them, were two Dead men. The first had had most of the flesh savagely torn from his face while the second clearly had died as Dead hands ripped open his stomach to feast upon his organs and even now, from the bloody gaping hole the last remnants of his intestines trailed behind him. Tom knew any movement would attract the two Dead men. So as he hung from the rope, his muscles starting to shake with the strain, he prayed they would soon pass by without noticing the flesh they craved hanging just above their heads. Luckily for Tom, somewhere in the grounds someone else was meeting their end and as the screams of horrendous agony drifted on the breeze, the first of the Dead men span on his heels and darted off to join in the bloody banquet. As he ran past the Dead man with his belly ripped open he knocked into him, sending him tumbling to the ground. With no stomach muscles for support, the Dead man was having difficulty righting himself and as he slowly pushed himself to his knees he inadvertently tilted his head in Tom’s direction. Instantly his slowly decaying brain knew these living things hanging mid-air, just out of his reach, were something his teeth needed to tear into. They held within them that indefinable spark of life, a quality his mind could no longer process but somehow knew his body craved. It would feed the compulsion within him to rip, tear, gorge and consume until he was full and no spark remained. But the Dead man had no way to know he would never feel the release of a full stomach, even if he still had one. For his bloody hands could stuff stolen flesh into his mouth until the muscles rotted on his bones and he would still never feel sated, such was the way of the Dead.

‘Shit!’ said Tom, locking eyes with the Dead man.

But Tom needn’t have worried, for even as the Dead man leant forward to push himself up from his knees, an unnoticed dark form appeared behind him. Suddenly the Dead man’s head snapped violently to one side and then the other as Tyrone rained heavy blows down upon him. By the third blow the back of the Dead man’s skull had been reduced to little more than dark bloody pulp and as he momentarily swayed on his knees, Tyrone brought his pipe down for a killing blow. Realising time was of the essence, Tom continued his descent and by the time his feet finally touched down on the roof of the cart, the Dead man was slumped face down on the grass, truly lifeless at last.

‘Where’s the other cart?’ whispered Charlie, finally closing the roof hatch behind him, as he followed Liz and the others down into the already very cramped cart.

‘Fuck knows!’ replied Michael, glancing over his shoulder but unable to see anything in the darkness. ‘By the time we got there some bastard had nicked it… I doubt we’ll see the dappled mare or the cart again.’

‘Do you think it could have been Sally?’ asked Liz, only just remembering the woman was missing as Anne climbed onto her arms.

‘I doubt it… At least, not on her own,’ said Charlie quietly, steadying himself against one of the walls when the cart jolted forward. ‘Sally isn’t the type of woman to go it alone.’

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Tom in a low voice. ‘Stay in here or leave?’

‘I say we get out of here,’ said Tyrone. ‘Why risk it?’

‘We’ve got no supplies, hardly any weapons and there are about six bodies too many in here for travelling any distance,’ noted Charlie, realising they may be safe from the Dead for now but in the long run it didn’t look good at all.

‘If someone’s already left then presumably the gate will be open,’ whispered Cam, ‘How about we get to the other side of the wall, close the gate behind us and wait the Dead out until morning…’

‘And then come back to stock up and hopefully find another horse and cart,’ added Charlie. ‘I like it… good idea.’

‘Right then,’ mumbled Michael, gently flicking Snow’s reins.

For the next few minutes the group travelled in silence. Only the creaking of the cart’s wheels, the crunch of gravel under hoof and the distant screams of those unfortunate souls still trapped among the Dead filling their thoughts as Michael guided Snow along the long path to the gate.

‘Can’t see a fucking thing,’ he grumbled, leaning forward to peer through the thin channel cut into the wooden wall in front of him.

Craning his head round to look over Michael’s shoulder at what he could see through the viewing slit, Phil tapped the man and pointed to the left.

‘That’s the edge of the wooded area,’ he whispered, indicating a slightly darker patch of blackness, ‘If you keep that on our left side and the sound of gravel under the wheels we should be…’

His words were abruptly cut short by the sight of a naked young woman running across their path sprinting towards to woods as if her life depended on it. Directly behind her, almost within arm’s reach, was a second woman clothed in a gore splattered oversized T-shirt. Startlingly similar in appearance, the two had to be related in some way but at the moment there was a world of difference between the two, the second woman was Dead.

‘Charlie,’ said Phil, already reaching for the handle of one of the side hatches, ‘she needs our help… I’m going out.’

‘What?... Phil!’ Charlie managed to say before soft moonlight flooded the cart’s interior.

‘Damn!’ he continued, catching a glimpse of Phil’s back as he ran to the woman’s aid, a heavy length of pipe in his hand.

As it happened, the young woman wasn’t quite as helpless as she first appeared and dropping suddenly to her knees, she allowed the Dead woman to plough directly into her crouched form, sending her flying. Before the Dead woman had even landed on the gravel, the young woman was up on her feet and surprisingly charging towards, rather than away from, the moving corpse. When she reached her, the Dead woman was just pushing herself up with arms but with more power than her lithe body suggested, the young woman leapt into the air, her right leg extended and landed hard on the back of the Dead woman’s neck. With a sickening crack the woman’s neck broke and at last her Dead limbs were still.

As if all the wind had suddenly been taken from her sails, the young woman slumped to ground, her hands in her lap as she forlornly watched the impotently snapping jaws of the Dead woman still trying to reach her.

‘Would you like me to finish her?’ asked Phil, coming to a halt just behind the young woman.

‘What? Oh… No, no I’ll do it,’ she managed to say, tilting her head up to Phil. ‘We… we promised each other… if… if one of us ever…’

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Phil interrupted, crouching down beside her as he pulled his hunting knife free of the sheath on his calf. ‘You shouldn’t have to do this…’

‘No… I promised,’ she replied, her tone telling him anything else was not an option.

With a nod of understanding, Phil flipped the knife in his hand and handed it to her, handle first. For a moment the woman looked at the comically large knife in her small hand, a flash of silver momentarily illuminating her face as the blade reflected the moon above her. With her fingers shaking slightly, the young woman pushed aside the Dead woman’s blood-matted hair and choked back the deep sob that threatened to overwhelm her.

‘Debs,’ she said, ignoring the visage of the snarling corpse with the snapping jaws that even now looked at her with such wild desperation and need.

For she could not see the monster the woman in front of her had become, she could only see her sister. The sister that had held her as hell vomited forth its plague on humanity condemning them to an all too short life of fear and pain, the sister who had fought by her side to keep the Dead at bay for the last five years and the sister who had ultimately sacrificed herself so that she could live. But they had made a promise to each other, a vow that neither of them could break and even as the tears fell freely from the young woman’s eyes she took the knife and placed it above the growling cadaver’s ear.