Last Days With The Dead (Lanherne Chronicles Book 3)

by Stephen Charlick

  With only one more of the Dead remaining on the road, Liz was determined to deal with this one herself. Turning to Imran, she held up her hand for him to hold his fire. Despite the annoyed look on his face, he did as she asked, and lowered his bow. Liz, satisfied that it would be her blow that gave this abomination the peace it rightly deserved, walked slowly over to meet the Dead child hobbling towards her. The pathetic thing could only have been ten or eleven when it died, its life hardly begun before it was ended so violently. With its emaciated frame and patchy lank hair, Liz realised she was unable to tell whether it had been a boy or a girl. Whatever it had been, she knew it had been loved, and its loss mourned over. In honour of that love, she would end its suffering and end it quickly. She watched its jaws snapping hungrily at her, as it stumbled closer and with a quick prayer to a God she hope was listening, she stepped forward, swinging her blade over her head. As the blade connected with the top of the child’s skull, the papery skin and brittle bone tore. In its last moments of un-life, the child brought its tiny hands up to grasp the blade, now imbedded in its skull and then with a look of almost relief flashing over its decaying features, the child fell. Liz looked down at the small crumpled body lying at her feet and knew but for Charlie, she too may have met a similar fate.

  With motherly tenderness, Liz bent down, gathered the small child’s body in her arms, and carried it over to the side of the road. Once she had finally given the child its permanent place of rest, she stood and turned to see Imran standing by the cart watching her.

  ‘If it was Saleana, would you want someone to just toss her corpse aside like so much trash?’ she asked softly, as she walked past him, seeing the question in his eyes.

  ‘Liz…’ was all Imran could say, his eyes slowly drifting back to the small body now lying under a flowering blackberry bush.

  Once Imran had retrieved his arrows and pulled the other five bodies over to the side of the road, he climbed back into the cart, closing the hatch behind him. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he watched Liz silently picking at the rim of one of the spy holes.

  ‘That will never happen to Saleana,’ Imran said, pulling Liz to him, ‘we know that no matter what happens, she’ll never come back as one of those things.’

  ‘I know,’ Liz replied softly, her fingers gripping tightly onto Imran’s jacket, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I know,’ he answered, smiling as he gently kissed the top of her head.

  ‘If you two have finished,’ Phil interrupted with a smile, ‘I think we should get going to the village before all that’s left is a pile of smouldering ruins.’

  ‘Well, you’re the one with the reins in your hand, big man,’ Liz replied, nodding for him to go.

  ‘Right,’ Phil mumbled, turning back to face the road ahead and giving the reins a flick, ‘come on boy.’

  ***

  ‘Can you see anything?’ asked Liz, looking up at Phil.

  When they had arrived at the village of St Mawgan twenty minutes later, it hadn’t taken them long to track down the source of the smoke they had seen from Lanherne. Whatever was on fire was burning from behind the high boarded up railings of the village school. At one time, it had been the home of Jackson and had ultimately become his tomb, when he finally decided to take his own life. During his stay there, he had meticulously gone from house to house removing doors, which he then used to bolt to the railings, allowing him to hide from the hungry eyes of the Dead. Even now, the wall of doors still prevented Liz, Imran, and Phil from seeing into the playground, which had been turned over to grow vegetables by Jackson.

  ‘There’s not enough smoke for it to be the school on fire,’ replied Phil in a whisper, as he stood on tiptoe trying to look out of an upstairs window of the building opposite the school. ‘My guess is that there’s a small fire somewhere on the old playground.’

  ‘But how did it get lit,’ Liz mulled, ‘as you said before, it’s not been dry enough for it to light on its own and…’

  ‘Wait,’ Phil interrupted, ‘I can see movement… it looks like a woman.’

  ‘Do you think she’s on her own?’ Liz asked, craning her neck to try to see for herself.

  ‘Only one way to tell,’ Phil replied, looking down at her. ‘Come on; let’s get back to the cart.’

  They had left Imran, Samson, and the cart hidden from view in a side street a hundred meters from the school. Luckily, they had found the village clear of the Dead when they arrived, whether it was down to the unknown arrivals, they could only guess. They had come across a small pile of battered corpses dumped by the side of the road just before they had entered the village proper, so they assumed so.

  ‘How are we going to play this?’ whispered Imran, looking from Phil to Liz. ‘Whoever they are, they’re hardly just going to open the gates to people they don’t know, we certainly wouldn’t.’

  ‘I think I should do it,’ replied Liz. ‘We know there’s at least one woman in there, perhaps she’ll be more inclined to open up if she hears another woman’s voice.’

  ‘Worth a shot,’ agreed Phil, ‘but I think Imran should cover you from the top hatch, just in case.’

  ‘Cover from the Dead or from whoever’s inside the school grounds?’ Liz asked, arching her eyebrow.

  ‘Both,’ Imran replied, flatly.

  ‘Great,’ said Liz to herself, pushing her legs through one of the side hatches, ‘never knew I was so popular.’

  Liz walked across the grass that was growing in clumps through the cracked road surface, and paused when she reached the gate. When Jackson had lived here, there would be a bucket of brightly coloured balls that you could toss over the railing so he would know someone was waiting for him, now though, the balls where gone, so Liz knew she would have to resort to a somewhat noisier method. Listening, she could just about hear over the crackle and spit of burning wood, some movement of someone on the other side of the barricaded railings.

  ‘Hello?’ She called, looking back up at Imran who was scanning the streets for the Dead. ‘Hello, is anybody there? Don’t be scared, we’re here to offer help, if you need it.’

  The sound of movement inside stopped the moment her words left her mouth.

  ‘Hello, are you still there?’ she continued, placing her ear against the gate.

  This time she could definitely hear whispered voices drifting over the railings. What they were saying, she couldn’t tell, but at least she now knew the woman wasn’t alone.

  ‘We have access to a doctor if you need it,’ Liz said when the whispering stopped.

  Using Avery was their ace in the hole. So few doctors had escaped those first few days that saw hospitals turned into hellish bloodbaths, and to find anyone with medical knowledge these days, was simply a Godsend. At the mention of a doctor, the whispering started up again, this time clearly with a sense of urgency, and then it abruptly stopped.

  ‘Alright,’ came a woman’s voice, ‘step back from the gate.’

  Liz did as she was told, and was soon rewarded by the sound of padlocked chains being unthreaded from the gate. With a ‘creak’, the gate slowly opened inwards, revealing the thin figure of a woman. She was forty-ish, dressed in jeans and dirty T-shirt, and her sandy hair had been cut roughly in bob. As usual, her face had the gaunt touch that came from living on only just enough food, and she had a smudge of ash on her cheek.

  ‘You have a doctor?’ she asked, her accent giving her away as someone who had grown up in Cornwall.

  ‘Yes,’ Liz replied, trying to give the woman a reassuring smile, ‘well, not here, but up at the Convent, yes, we have a doctor.’

  ‘Tell him to put that down,’ the woman said, looking up at Imran, who still held his bow ready.

  ‘What? Oh,’ Liz said looking back at Imran. ‘Imran, it’s okay.’

  Reluctantly, Imran did as Liz asked him.

  ‘My name’s Liz,’ said Liz, turning back to the thin woman, ‘do you need a doctor? Is someone sick?’

  It was clear that the
woman was frantically weighing something up in her mind, and then she eventually chose to speak.

  ‘Not me,’ she replied, nodding back behind her, ‘the baby, it’s burning up. And my name is Melissa, Lissa they call me,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘Well, do you want to come with us, Lissa?’ Liz asked. ‘I think our doctor still has some antibiotics, we don’t mind giving them to your baby.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ asked Lissa, her eyes narrowing in mistrust.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to set up home in the school, it makes sense that we’re neighbourly, who knows when we might need a favour returned,’ Liz began, noticing a second set of small feet pocking out from just the other side of the gate. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t take much for a disease to spread a mile up the road and then we’ll get it too, so we might as well stop it here.’

  Lissa’s eyes flicked briefly to the figure behind the gate and then she nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ she finally said, opening the gate wider to reveal a young teenage girl holding a sleeping red faced infant in her arms.

  ‘This is Lucy, my daughter,’ Lissa said, placing her hand on the girls shoulder, ‘and the baby is, well, we’ve learnt not to name them until they’ve survived their first year.’

  Liz looked from Lissa to the young girl and could clearly see the resemblance between them.

  ‘And is there just the two of you?’ Liz asked, knowing whatever Lissa said, there was at least one other person hidden somewhere behind those railings, after all, someone had to be the baby’s father.

  ‘Yes,’ Lissa said, looking Liz directly in the eyes, as if challenging her to question the statement. ‘Yes, just us two and the baby.’

  There was no way this woman could have travelled here on foot across a countryside full of the Dead with a young girl and sick baby in tow. But Liz knew trust had to be earned, so didn’t push the issue. Once she had been to Lanherne and Avery had helped the baby, she hoped Lissa would be able to trust her enough with the truth.

  ‘Wait here, Lu,’ Lissa said to her daughter, her glance at Liz betraying that she was still hesitant to trust these strangers that had arrived uninvited. ‘I just need to get some things.’

  With a wide-eyed nod from Lucy, Lissa disappeared from view behind the door covered railings.

  ‘Have you been boiling your water?’ Liz asked, trying to engage the girl in conversation, as she stepped forward to place the back of her hand on the baby’s forehead.

  ‘We’re not stupid,’ the girl snapped, stepping quickly away from Liz.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’ Liz began to apologise as Lissa returned carrying a large purple canvas bag.

  ‘Lu, you giving cheek?’ Lissa said, glaring at her daughter.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ Liz interrupted, not wanting the girl to get into trouble. ‘My fault for asking a stupid question really.’

  Lissa looked from her daughter and back to Liz.

  ‘Well, the sooner we get to this doctor of yours, the sooner we get back,’ Lissa said, pushing her daughter carrying the baby through the gate.

  ‘Oh… right,’ Liz replied, hoping for Lucy’s sake that the woman wasn’t always this gruff, ‘follow me.’

  Liz turned to the cart just at the moment Imran let fly one of his arrows. Instinctively, Liz reached behind her for her sword, expecting trouble.

  ‘It’s alright,’ Imran called down to Liz with a wave of his free hand, ‘there was only one.’

  ‘He’s a good shot,’ remarked Lissa, looking over at the still body now lying crumpled against the wall of the old Post office some thirty meters away.

  ‘Yes,’ Liz replied pulling open one of the side hatches, ‘Imran’s one of our best.’

  Not waiting for introductions, Lissa pushed her daughter up into the cart and clambered in after her. Liz looked up at Imran and shrugged her shoulders. It was odd, one minute, the woman was wary of them, and the next she couldn’t wait to get going.

  ‘Perhaps they’re just not used to being around other people,’ Liz thought to herself, climbing into the cart and closing the hatch after her.

  ‘You came prepared,’ Lissa said, nodding to the array of weapons that had been hooked onto the inside of the cart.

  ‘Well, we have a policy of clearing the Dead whenever we come across them, so yes, we’re always prepared for trouble,’ Phil said over his shoulder, while he guided Samson round a particularly large pothole.

  If Liz hadn’t been looking directly at Lucy, she may have missed the brief look she gave her mother. Even in the shadowy cart, Liz had seen the flash of anger that had flitted across the girl’s face. Just at what her anger was directed, she had no idea, but Liz suddenly had an odd sense of niggling apprehension beginning to seed at the back of her mind. Perhaps there was more to Lissa and her family than she first thought.

  ***

  ‘And how old is the baby?’ Avery asked, looking from the small infant on the bed up to Lissa, who stood with her arm firmly gripped on her elder daughter’s shoulder.

  ‘Six months,’ she replied, flatly.

  ‘Hmm,’ Avery mulled to himself, gently feeling the swollen glands in the infant’s neck, ‘he’s very small, but that’s to be expected these days. Has he been vomiting or having diarrhoea at all?’

  ‘No,’ said Lucy, before her mother could answer.

  Avery smiled at the girl and returned his attention back to his small patient.

  When the cart had finally returned back at Lanherne an hour and a half after their departure from the school, there was a general sense of relief to find out that the smoke had only been coming from a camp fire. As Samson had pulled their cart through the gates and into the courtyard, Liz could see from Lissa’s and Lucy’s face that the Convent had not been what they had been expecting.

  ‘And the Dead can’t get in?’ Lucy had asked Imran, as she nervously looked up at the walkway running the perimeter of the wall.

  ‘Not a chance,’ he replied, using his bow to point. ‘The only ways in or out are the double gates we drove through and the small side gate over there.’

  While Imran and Lucy had chatted, Liz noticed Lissa looking uncomfortably from one clean, welcoming face to the next, and then when she thought no eyes were upon her, self-consciously looking down at her own stained and tattered clothes. Liz hoped a shower and some clean clothes would go a long way to getting Lissa to trust them, but first, there was the baby to deal with. It wasn’t until Phil had sent Justin off in search of Avery that Liz realised she didn’t even know if the infant was a boy or a girl.

  ‘Is the baby a boy or girl?’ Liz had asked, as she led the new arrivals through the corridors of Lanherne to the side room Avery had turned into his hospital.

  ‘A boy,’ replied Lucy, truly smiling for the first time.

  After Avery had done his examination of the small infant, he reached into his precious stores of medical supplies and withdrew a vial of clear liquid and a hypodermic.

  ‘I’m going to give him a shot of general antibiotics,’ he said, pushing the needle through the top of the vial, ‘it should help the little chap fight the infection. Apart from that, we need to keep him hydrated and bathed in cool water to help bring his temperature down.’

  ‘Will he live?’ Lissa asked.

  ‘Well, I can’t promise anything, but he’s certainly got a better chance now that you’re here,’ replied Avery, gently holding the boys tiny arm as he injected the antibiotics.

  At this, Lucy pulled away from her mother’s grip and knelt down by the side of the bed, taking the boy’s tiny hand in her own. For such a sick baby, Avery noticed he still had a fierce grip, which could prove promising. Avery looked at the thin, unkempt girl knelt beside him, and noticed something that puzzled him.

  ‘How old are you Lucy?’ he asked casually, as he unscrewed the hypodermic needle so it could be sterilised and reused.

  ‘Twelve,’ Lucy replied, her attention unwavering from the baby on the bed.

 
; ‘Come away, Lu,’ Lissa said reaching for her daughter, ‘let the doctor finish his work, he doesn’t want you getting in his way.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Avery replied, as Lucy automatically moved to stand by her mother.

  ‘How long do we have to stay?’ Lissa asked, looking from Avery to Liz.

  ‘Sorry?’ Liz replied, unsure as to what Lissa meant.

  ‘How long do we have to stay?’ she repeated. ‘When can we go back to the school?’

  ‘This place isn’t a prison,’ Liz began, crossing her arms defensively, ‘we’re trying to help you and your children.’

  ‘I think you should at least stay the night,’ Avery said, in his best doctor’s voice, ‘you’re both in need of a good meal and a good night’s sleep in a safe bed. Someone will take you back to the village in the morning, if you decide not to stay.’

  Liz could see Lissa wasn’t too keen to stay, but eventually common sense won over and she agreed with a sharp nod.

  ‘Okay,’ said Liz, pushing open the door, ‘now that’s settled, how about we leave the baby in Dr Avery’s expert care, and get you two a wash and something to eat.’