Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead (9 page)

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ said Phil, pacing back and forth, his gaze flicking from Carmella to Vincenzo’s blood soaked body.

‘Phil,’ said Cam finally looking up from his hands covered in Vincenzo’s blood. ‘Phil, he’s gone…’

‘Shit!’ he replied, realising what he would now have to do.

‘Carmella,’ Cam continued, his voice little more than a whisper, ‘Carmella, you need to let him go now… he’s gone Carmella, he’s gone…’

But the grief stricken woman would not relinquish her husband’s body. To let him go was to accept what was happening was real and that she could not do.

‘Carmella, please…’ whispered Cam again, ‘it’s not safe… Carmella he’ll come back…’

‘No!’ she suddenly screamed, looking from Cam to Phil and back to Cam. ‘No! No! No! Not Vincenzo… you cannot… you cannot!’

‘Carmella,’ said Fran, squatting down to put her arm about the hysterical woman’s shoulder, ‘you must… think of the baby… you must let him go.’

But Carmella only pulled her husband’s body closer to her, desperate to cling to the last remnants of her past life.

‘We don’t have time, Carmella,’ Fran continued, trying to prise the woman from Vincenzo’s bloody corpse. ‘He’ll turn…’

‘No, no, no, no…’ Carmella wailed, rocking back and forth.

Fran looked up at Phil.

‘Do something!’ she said. ‘Before it’s too late, you’ve got to do something!’

Phil looked back at her, momentarily not knowing what to do for the best.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Fran cried, her own grief for her lost sister still fresh and raw inside her suddenly bubbling to the surface to mirror Carmella’s.

‘Carmella!’ shouted Cam, causing the grief stricken woman to suddenly look at him.

The moment she did he struck out at her, landing a hefty punch to her chin. Instantly Carmella stopped sobbing as her eyes rolled back in her head, brief unconsciousness claiming her.

‘Do it!’ He said to Phil, pulling Carmella’s prone body away from Vincenzo’s corpse. ‘Before he comes back! Do it now!’

‘Tyrone, David, help Cam get Carmella back into the other cart in case she comes round…. she doesn’t need to see this…’ he said, shaking his head at such a cruel waste of life while pulling a large knife from a strap on his calf.

Slowly Phil got down on his knees and pulled Vincenzo’s limp body up onto his lap. As he moved the body a violent spasm suddenly shot through the corpse causing the back of its head to smash painfully into Phil’s nose and knocking the knife from his hand.

‘Fuck!’ he said, already tasting his own blood as the corpse jolted again and again in his arms.

‘Jesus!’ Phil cried, struggling to get his arm under the moving corpse’s chin. ‘We’re too late… he’s already coming back,’

Then as quickly as it had begun the moving stopped.

‘Phil,’ whispered Fran, her eyes widening in horror as she stared into the face of the corpse in his arms, ‘he’s…’

But a low guttural growl suddenly cut off her words.

‘Shit!’ Phil managed to say before the corpse began to wildly thrash its limbs, desperate to get to the living flesh it knew was tantalisingly close, desperate to feed.

With his arm under the corpse’s chin, Phil could at least keep the creature’s snapping jaws away from him but holding it at bay like this could only be a temporary solution.

‘Fran, the knife!’ he said through gritted teeth as he struggled to keep the manic cadaver in a headlock. ‘Get me the fucking knife!’

Before he had even finished the words Fran was moving, running towards him with the scooped up knife flashing in her hand.

‘Pull him back!’ she shouted, leaping towards Phil.

Doing as he was told, Phil leant backwards pulling the struggling corpse with him. Fran, barely slowing, jumped over the corpse’s wildly kicking legs and landed straddling his chest. With a scream of both grief and anger for what their lives had now become, she plunged the knife through the snapping mouth of the thing had been Vincenzo and thrust upward with as much strength as she could muster. Teeth shattered, flesh ripped and bone cracked but as Fran ‘grunted’ with effort the blade finally broke through the roof of the creature’s mouth to tear through up into the brain. With a brief ‘gagging’ sound, Vincenzo’s body rightfully became still, his limbs finally falling lifeless to the road.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, reaching up to close his eyes, his lashes matted with his own blood.

Then, as she yanked the knife free of his ruined mouth, two of his bottom teeth caught on the guard and broke under the force of her pull. For a second she looked at the bloody chips now lying on Vincenzo’s chin and dropping the knife by her side, she pushed herself up and walked back to the open hatch of the first cart.

‘Thanks,’ panted Phil, pushing Vincenzo’s lifeless body to one side. ‘You did good there…’

‘Good?’ She said, stopping to look blankly back at Phil. ‘Tell that to Carmella…’

With that she climbed into the cart and closed the hatch behind her.

***

‘We’ve got a live one!’ shouted Michael, dropping to his knees by the burnt woman.

‘P…Please k… k… kill m…me…,’ the woman repeated, her tearful eyes begging for release from the pain.

Wanting to console her, even if only to simply take her hand, Michael was at a loss to find a part of the poor woman free of burns and weeping raw blisters. It had been a miracle she had survived this long, her body was a mass of tortured flesh. She had been trapped from the waist down by the fallen debris that he saw blocked the rest of the corridor leading from the dining hall, much of which was still smouldering. Michael could only imagine what unbelievable pain she had endured over the last few hours; her suffering truly was the stuff of nightmares.

‘P…Please…’ she begged again, each breath a new torture to endure.

Michael knew they had to do something to end this retched woman’s suffering but looking at the crowbar he held in his hand he doubted he had it in him to club her to death. Behind him he heard the shuffling of footsteps across the dining hall floorboards. Looking over his shoulder he was relieved to see Charlie and Liz appearing through the gloom. Like him they too now had tea-towels wrapped about their faces to keep out the smoke.

‘Shit!’ mumbled Charlie from behind his mask as he took in the state of the poor woman.

The woman’s beseeching gaze moved from Charlie to settle on Liz.

‘H... h… help m… me…’ she managed to whisper, her mounting pain making speech almost unbearable.

Liz knew what was to be done. If it had been another time, another place, another world where the Dead had not come to stalk the living, this woman may have had a chance but here and now every second she lived was nothing but a cruel torment.

Stepping past Michael, Liz crouched down and looked into the woman’s eyes filled with a longing for the pain to end.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Charlie by her side, wanting to spare her at least this. ‘I can…’

‘No, Charlie,’ she interrupted, unable to take her eyes away from burnt woman’s gaze, ‘I do…’

‘I’m sorry,’ she continued, pulling down her mask so the trapped woman in front of her could see her face. ‘It’ll be quick and you won’t come back… I promise…’

A single heavy tear rolled from the corner of one of the woman’s eyes down across her burnt cheek. Even this simple act of sorrow caused her to take a sharp faltering intake of breath against the pain.

‘D… do it,’ the woman pleaded, finally closing her blistered eyelids to await her end.

Slowly standing, Liz repositioned her mask and with her sword held high behind her she readied herself to end the woman’s suffering. For the briefest second Liz hesitated, the sword shaking slightly in her grasp but then she saw the woman’s tightly clenched hand. Such was the ferocity of the pain that wracked through her burnt body that her fingernails had dug into the raw flesh of her shaking fist, drawing blood. With this Liz knew she had to do the only thing she could to stop this woman’s torment and so her blade fell. With a soft ‘thud’ the end of her blade connected with the chard floorboards beneath the woman’s neck. Liz closed her eyes and threw a brief prayer to the heavens for the nameless woman she had just released. When she opened them again Charlie had stepped forward, turned the woman’s now severed head to one side and had plunged the knife at his wrist deep into her brain, making sure Liz would keep her promise. This woman’s pain had finally come to an end and her body could now rest unmolested by whatever turned corpses into a plague of the wandering Dead.

‘Looks like this way is a no go,’ mumbled Charlie, pushing himself back up into a standing position as he looked past the body of the woman to the blackened beams and rubble that blocked the corridor. ‘We’ll have to find another way if we want to check out the rest of the building.’

Retracing their steps they met Tom back inside the kitchen leaning against a sink, chewing on a large carrot.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Liz, her stomach rumbling slightly at the sight of Tom eating.

‘I think we should just salvage what we can and be on our way,’ said Michael. ‘Why go looking for trouble?’

‘Hmm…’ mused Charlie, weighing up the usefulness of the things they could be leaving behind against their safety.

‘Now that the grounds are clear of the Dead I think we should bring the carts in,’ Liz began, wiping the woman’s blood from her blade with the tea-towel as her stomach growled again. ‘We clear out what we can from the kitchen, harvest what crops are ready outside…’

‘And there’s bound to be odd and ends we can use for weapons from the sheds,’ added Michael.

‘Tom?’ asked Charlie, looking over at his friend. ‘What do you think?’

As their chosen leader ultimately it would be Charlie’s decision to make and they would follow it but like all good leaders he wanted as many points of view as possible before making up his mind.

‘You know if it was just me I’d hunt down every one of the bastards room by room,’ he replied, his cheek full of half chewed carrot, ‘but it’s not… Michael’s right, there’s no point endangering more lives if we don’t have to…’

Charlie nodded, realising the others were probably right.

‘OK,’ he said, reaching over to take the carrot from Tom’s hand to take a bite himself, ‘I agree. Let’s get the others in and just leave with what we can.’

‘I’ll get a fire started under this,’ said Michael, already lifting the pot holding the half made rabbit stew over to the large barbeque which had been used by those at the Institute to cook their food. ‘We might as well cook and eat it before we leave.’

‘Good idea,’ crunched Charlie, idly passing the carrot to Liz who had been enviously eyeing it. ‘Once we’ve closed the gates I’ll send some of the others in to help you go through all the cupboards and drawers for anything we can take with us.’

‘OK,’ said Michael, pulling open drawer after drawer looking for a kitchen knife sharp enough to carve up the skinned rabbit carcasses for the pot.

Leaving Michael at work in the kitchen, Liz, Tom and Charlie returned to the patchwork of vegetable beds dotted here and there with rainwater barrels that covered much of the Institute’s grounds.

‘Looks like all of the other Dead must be trapped in the rest of the building,’ said Liz, looking back up at the few remaining soot stained windows for any shadowy movement within.

‘Looks like it,’ agreed Charlie, his attention more on those windows whose panes had been shattered by the fire.

‘We’ll have to be on our guard though,’ he continued, as they began walking up the gravel driveway to the open gate. ‘They may not be able to get past the barred windows but there’s been so much structural damage to the building they may yet find a way out…’

‘Heads up!’ interrupted Tom, nodding to the lone figure of a Dead man dragging his emaciated frame past the main gate towards them.

The Dead man, dressed in only a filthy pair of underpants and the remains of one tattered sock, was a so skeletal that Liz wondered just how the creature managed to keep moving at all. His skin, taught and paper thin over his wasted muscles, had taken on the grey hue of those long dead, while across his chest and much of his face a strange green creeping mould had begun to bloom.

‘I’ll get him,’ growled Tom, stepping ahead of Charlie and Liz as he reached behind his back to pull free the two sickles from their strappings.

Charlie was about the say something but Tom was already off, eager to meet the cadaver full on; eager to appease the whispered pleas of his lost family. With a flash of metal Tom lashed out at the shambling Dead man, an arm suddenly falling lifeless to the ground. Then as he darted behind the slowly moving corpse his sickle struck again, this time severing the leg with the tattered sock at the knee. With nothing to support him, the emaciated Dead man   immediately became a heap of skin covered bones at Tom’s feet. Readying himself for the finishing blows Tom placed his boot between the struggling cadaver’s shoulder blades, effectively pinning him to the ground.

As Liz and Charlie approached she could have sworn she saw Tom’s lips moving, as if he was talking to himself or the corpse at his feet. Glancing over to Charlie by her side, she saw he too had a similar confused expression.