Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead (40 page)

She had just closed her fist about the handle of her fallen blade when she heard a woman’s scream.

‘No!’ screamed the woman and with that one word, Liz recognised who it was.

‘Fran!’ she said under her breath, pushing herself away from the wall.

But fighting off Parker’s cadaver must have taken more out of her than she first realised, for as Liz left behind the helpful support of the wall a wave of dizziness swept over her; sending her head spinning and a torrent of sparking lights at the edges of her vision.

‘Shit!’ she hissed, her hand automatically reaching out for the wall again as she pulled in another lungful of much needed air.

Suddenly another scream echoed along the corridor and Liz knew dizzy or not, she had to help. So trying to blink away the stars that still danced across her vision, she let her hand slip away from the wall and walked in the direction of Fran’s cries as urgently as her shaking legs would allow.

***

Fran felt the fingers of the Dead woman tighten about her wrist, desperate to pull the living flesh she desired nearer to her mouth of broken and blackened teeth.

‘No!’ Fran screamed, using what little space she had left to kick out at the Dead woman’s chest.

As Fran’s forceful blow sent the woman’s body flying backwards into the arms of the corpses behind her there was a sickening tearing and popping sound; for such was the tenacity of the cadaver’s grip on Fran that the Dead woman’s decaying arm was ripped free at the shoulder.

‘Christ!’ Fran hissed, shaking free the arm still clinging to her.

‘Fran!’ Tom cried, one of his blades sweeping barely a hair’s breadth from her face to slice through the wrist of a Dead man about to latch onto her shoulder.

Spinning to meet the new attacker head on, Fran swung out with her newly acquired marble club, smashing it against the Dead man’s temple. With a ‘crunch’ the corpse’s skull collapsed under her blow, giving him at last the final death so long denied him.

With the Dead on both sides, Tom and Fran had inadvertently found themselves backed against a wall fighting for their very lives. No matter how fast they spun, slashed, clubbed and kicked out at the Dead horde their attackers were relentless and no sooner had one decaying shell been kicked away or a slack jawed head removed from its shoulders, than another simply pushed its way forward to take its place. Already Fran could feel the muscles in her arms and legs burning from the exertion and she knew what little reserves of strength she had were fading fast. The reality of the situation filled her with a fearful and resounding dread, for she knew this was not a fight they were going to win. The Dead, purely by their greater number, were going to beat them and no matter how many of them she pushed aside it was only a matter of time before she felt the searing pain of teeth ripping through her skin.

‘There’s too many!’ she cried, the realisation of her impending death bringing tears to her eyes. ‘Tom, there’s just too many!’

With a roar, Tom ripped free the partly decapitated head of a Dead woman, tossing it angrily into the pushing crowd.

‘Try to get behind me!’ he shouted over the moans of the Dead, kicking the headless corpse into the out stretched arms of a teenage girl’s cadaver.

‘It’s no use!’ Fran screamed, clubbing at the skull of a severely decayed child that had managed to slip under the arms of its taller Dead brethren. ‘We’re not going to make it!’

Suddenly a door slammed open at the top of the staircase and a figure stumbled through. Sparing a few precious seconds to glance at the source of the sound, Fran locked eyes with Liz and saw her own desperation, panic and horror mirrored there.

‘No!’ shouted Fran, knowing the young woman was about to risk her own life to save them, ‘There’s too many, Liz… you need to get out of here!’

But Liz had already made her way to the top of the staircase, her gaze flitting from one ruined corpse to the next, desperate to help.

‘Don’t throw your life away, girl!’ yelled Tom, slashing at a pair of already blood covered hands reaching for him. ‘Get the fuck out of here!’

Already some of the cadavers at the back of the crowd had started to turn to face this newly arrived source of living flesh and with a new purpose driving their Dead limbs they began to edge their way to the base of the stairs.

‘You can’t save us, not this time!’ Fran cried through her hopelessness, as the rancid corpse of another Dead man lunged for her. ‘Think of Anne!’

At the mention of her sister’s name, Liz’s determination wavered. Shaking her head in despair, she knew Fran and Tom where right, the outcome of what she was seeing was inevitable; her friends were going to die and no matter how much she wanted it not to be so, she could never reach them in time to save them. She briefly locked eyes with Fran one more time and nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ Liz mouthed, a heavy tear escaping to roll down her cheek while she choked back the guilt ridden sob that tore through her.

With that, Liz slowly turned away and with a heavy reluctant heart left Tom and Fran to their bloody inescapable fate. As she walked back though the open doorway, pulling it closed behind her, she heard the ominous sound of breaking glass and then Fran screaming out one last time.

***

Kyle couldn’t believe his luck when Parker’s hungry corpse had appeared out of nowhere to take Liz down and as he made his stealthy escape he hoped Parker’s cadaver could show some of the restraint in death that had been severely lacking when he’d been alive; Kyle wanted Liz’s suffering to last. He wanted the Dead Parker to slowly flay the skin from the annoying bitch, piece by piece. He wanted him to rip mouthful after mouthful of her bloody flesh and stuff it greedily into his mouth as she watched him wide eyed and terrorised. He wanted her agony to be prolonged and to be immense. In fact the only regret he had about Liz’s imminent bloody demise was that he wouldn’t be there to enjoy it.

‘Escape’ was the single word screaming to be heard over and over again in Kyle’s mind. He knew he had to get out of Saint Xavier’s and to do so he would need Zak. It galled him that he needed the help of his older brother but Kyle knew that without him he wouldn’t even get as far as the gate, let alone anything beyond that point. He just had to hope Zak was still in his office and more importantly that he had been able to sleep off the effects of the little ‘relaxant’ he had supplied him with yesterday.

‘Zak!’ Kyle shouted, skidding to a halt by the open doorway of his brother’s shadowy room.

With a sense of relief flooding through him, Kyle saw his brother was sitting in his chair with his back to the door but he wasn’t alone. On her knees in front of Zak, Kyle could see the shape of a woman, her head darting forward as she made wet slobbering sounds.

‘For fuck’s sake, Zak,’ Kyle growled, ‘get your cock out of that bitches mouth, don’t you know what’s going on!’

At the sound of Kyle’s voice the woman suddenly jerked her head back from Zak’s lap and with shaky movements began to stand. It wasn’t until she was fully upright that the true horror of what was happening hit Kyle. For there, trailing from the woman’s hand by her mouth was something wet, bloody and tubular. With sickening terror Kyle realised it was Zak’s intestine. Apparently Zak was all too aware of just what was happening at Saint Xavier’s, in fact he was experiencing it first-hand. Shaking his head in disbelief, Kyle took a step backward. The Dead woman, as Kyle could now,  had been the Italian woman who had had the baby. She looked briefly down at  Zak’s lifeless form and then with the bloody half-chewed meat of his brother’s innards falling from her mouth, she refocused her attention back on Kyle.

‘No, no, no,’ Kyle managed to whisper as he watched the gore matted cadaver take a shambling step towards him.

It was only as Carmella’s corpse lifted her blood covered hands, reaching out to him with starving desperation, that Kyle’s mind was able to process what had happened or rather how it affected him and his survival. Zak was gone and would undoubtedly become one of the Dead within minutes and if Kyle wanted to live for much longer than that, he needed to get out of here. So, brushing aside his fear and a surprising twinge of grief, Kyle turned to flee.

But the fates had decided Kyle’s escape was not to be as easy as that for standing behind him, her own bloody arms reaching each to him, was Freya.

‘Jesus!’ Kyle screamed, slamming into the woman’s ruined body.

Freya had obviously died more recently than Carmella, for Kyle had barely enough time to glimpse the dark hunger that burned within her film covered eyes before a pair of Dead hands latched onto his shoulders.

‘No!’ he cried, his hands slipping across the Dead woman’s torn and devastated chest, touching parts of her body unnaturally exposed. ‘Get off me! Get off me!’

But Freya was unable to release her prize, such was her need to bite, chew, tear and destroy the living flesh that had walked into her arms, sacrificing itself to her desires; nothing would stop her from quenching the hunger that burned within her.

‘Fuck off!’ Kyle screamed, thrashing in her grasp as his panic began to overwhelm him.

Then purely by luck rather than by design, Kyle managed to somehow slip his hands up under Freya’s bloody chin. Much of the flesh of her neck had been torn away at some point and as Kyle’s fingers dup deep into ripped skin, broken cartilage and savaged muscle, the thumb of his right hand hooked under the bone of her jaw.

‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ he yelled again, his voice rising as he dug his thumb deeper into the wet flesh beneath her jaw, his fingers forcing their way through the thin muscle on the other side.

Despite the sickening feeling of Freya’s moving jaw in his grasp, Kyle knew this chance action may have just saved his life. He could feel her slug-like tongue moving in her mouth, brushing forcefully against the side of his thumb as if trying to taste him. He could feel the grate of bone on bone as he began to pull the jawbone out of alignment and then with his scream of determination filling his ears, he could feel the pop and rip of the final few ligaments and strips of skin as he tore her jaw free.

With a ‘crack’ Freya’s lower jaw swung limply to one side, her mouth now rendered to an impotent and useless bloody chasm and with that, Kyle thought he had beaten her. But Freya’s corpse was unaware of this change in her facial structure and in fact it simply didn’t matter. Within the workings of her rotting brain her jaw still moved, her teeth still tore and throat still swallowed; and nothing would stop her feeling the heavenly splash of hot wet living blood erupting into her mouth.

‘No!’ Kyle screamed as Freya’s ruined face darted forward once again.

But then suddenly Kyle felt a second pair of cold hands upon him, dragging him to the floor. Carmella had joined Freya’s corpse in the doorway and together they would gorge on Kyle’s buffet of living flesh. First with a cry of terror, Kyle fell to his knees and then as he struggled under the combined weight of the two Dead women, he crumpled tragically to the floor.

‘No! No! No!’ he screamed, hysterically kicking his legs about in an attempt to knock the two Dead women away from him. ‘Christ! No!’

But his efforts were pointless and as the two women clambered over him, each coveting a patch of exposed flesh, Kyle knew his time had come. Yet even now the cruel but just Fates had not finished with Kyle Barnett; for even as his screams became something wet, bloody and terrifying he saw the shaking figure of his brother, Zak, rising from his chair to turn his hungry gaze upon him.

***

With the horde of the Dead behind her and Kyle’s killers in front of her, Liz’s options for escape were limited to say the least. Any thoughts of retreating back to the staircase had been immediately discarded as unimaginable. Even if she could somehow get past the Dead in one piece, she simply couldn’t bear to witness what the horde had done to Tom and Fran; so the only way left open to her was onwards.

With her heart hammering loudly in her chest and her breath coming in sharp panicky gulps Liz pressed herself as tight to the wall as she could and prayed that the shadows hid her from the two Dead women tearing into Kyle. With each sly step she took their heads darted forward to rip free chunks of flesh from the screaming young man, while beneath them a pool of deep crimson slowly inched out across the dusty floor. Just how he had managed to survive this long under their cannibalistic attack was beyond her but she thanked the Gods that he had. The last thing she needed was for Carmella’s and Freya’s corpses to lose interest in him just yet, not only would they then resume their search for living flesh but also within minutes Kyle would join them. So, trying to match the sounds of her footfalls with Kyle’s horrific screams of agony, Liz inched closer to the next closed door. She had found the first two she tried to be locked and had been forced to move on but with the gap between her and the scene of bloody carnage closing fast she knew she was quickly running out of chances.

Her hand had just closed around the handle of the third door when Zak’s bloody figure stepped out into the hallway to look down on his dying brother. Liz knew there would be no recognition in those film covered eyes and no glint of remorse or pity would ever flash behind them. For now all they could see was the dwindling spark of life that dwelled within the warm and bloody shell at his feet. It was a spark that promised relief, if only momentarily, from the torment of his decaying existence; it was a spark he was compelled to consume.