Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead

by Stephen Charlick

  ‘A shop?’ Fran repeated, somewhat deflated by the reality of their find; that was until the true meaning of what Kai had said clicked in her mind. ‘A shop!’ she continued, her eyes suddenly sparkling with possibilities, ‘Please tell me the shelves are filled with tins of food… or you can at least see some detergent or soap or something.’

  ‘It’s a bit d…dark but…’ Kai began to say before Fran, unable to hold herself back, excitedly pushed him aside to take a look.

  ‘Oh… bum,’ she finally huffed, seeing for herself the rows of shelves inside; each with little more on them than a thick layer of dust. ‘Well, that’s a bit of a let-down,’ she continued, looking a little deflated as she turned her face away from the glass, ‘Guess it was a long shot that we’d found someone’s forgotten stash and that we’d…’

  It was then that her words slowly faded until at last her lips finally came together in silence; a look of concentration spreading across her face as she looked back at the woven wall.

  ‘And?’ asked Kai, instantly recognising the look on her face.

  ‘And… and this is quite fresh,’ she thought aloud, reaching out to rub a leaf between her finger and thumb. ‘Which means someone else has been here to put fresh foliage on so that it still matches the two living ends.’

  ‘And w…why would they do that if there’s n…nothing inside,’ said Kai, finishing her train of thought.

  ‘Exactly,’ she agreed, a smile spreading across her lips.

  For a moment she saw a look of apprehension cloud Kai’s features.

  ‘Look,’ she began, quickly checking once more on the progress of the wandering cadaver, ‘I get it. You think they found it first, it’s theirs.’

  ‘Fran,’ Kai started to protest, ‘we can’t just…’

  ‘No, no,’ she interrupted, knowing just what he was thinking. ‘Look, firstly who’s to say that whoever found this is even still alive… and if they are,’ she went on to say, her hands probing the wall as she moved to her left; searching for anything that looked like it may be the door, ‘well then we’ll leave something behind in exchange… some apples or some of the rabbit meat or something. We’re not some bastard Raiders taking what we want and fuck to those who get in our way.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he replied, realising from her tone that he may have touched a nerve. ‘B…but if this is someone’s home,’ he continued, reaching out to gently take her arm, ‘I don’t think they’ll ap…appreciate you ripping down their wall to get in, do you?’

  Fran looked at Kai, her hand frozen mid-movement.

  ‘Hmm, I guess you’re right,’ she reluctantly agreed, looking thoughtfully back and forth along the cleverly constructed camouflage. ‘And anyway,’ she added, finally breaking cover from behind the van to move to the far end of the wall where it became interwoven with the real hedgerow, ‘If someone does live here they’re clearly not going in this way. There must be another way in, a side entrance or round the back or something.’

  ‘Fran!’ hissed Kai, noticing that the approaching corpse had finally got close enough to become aware of their presence and was even now slowly changing his course to greet them; its arms held out in anticipation of the bloody embrace to come. ‘Company!’

  On alert, she instantly zeroed in on the advancing cadaver. Slowly rising, she instinctively broke the oncoming encounter down into its key moments of possible danger.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said, holding Kai back with a single wave of her hand. ‘I need to stop this one quickly before he starts moaning and lets every other stinking corpse in the area know we’re here.’

  Knowing Kai would follow her instructions without question, Fran strode purposefully forward without looking back; her grip tightening about the crowbar in her hand.

  Now that the cadaver had got close enough, Fran could see it had in fact once been a late-middle aged woman. Dressed in maroon trousers, the hems tattered and clogged with filth, and a darkly stained checked tabard worn over a grimy blouse, Fran thought the Dead woman looked like a bazaar Dinner lady from some hellish canteen.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Miss?’ she found herself thinking as she darted round the wreck of a car to meet her corpse head on, ‘Why, you are, dearie!’ she imagined the creature croaking in nightmare-ish reply.

  That was at least one mercy humanity had been spared, the Dead could not speak; they had no conscious thought processes, acting solely on the most primitive of instincts. To hear them pleading for a taste of your flesh, hopeful to quench the unending hunger that burned within them, now that would be too much for anyone to bear.

  ‘Not today, I’m not,’ Fran muttered aloud, as she boldly stepped up to the Dead woman; the corpse seeming to almost shake with excitement at the nearness of Fran’s living flesh.

  Ignoring the look of intense need on the Dead woman’s sallow and mould covered features, Fran quickly placed her feet slightly apart to brace herself and then let her crowbar swing. With a resonating ‘crack’, the corpse’s head was snapped sharply to the left by the power of her blow; a deep disfiguring dent appearing over the right side of her temple.

  ‘Shit!’ spat Fran, angry that her first strike hadn’t been enough to finish the creature.

  With the Dead woman stumbling slightly from the impact, Fran took another swing; making sure to aim at the centre of the forehead. Unlike her initial attack, this time as the crowbar hit home Fran could feel the front of the corpse’s skull collapse under the pressure exerted upon it. For a split second the Dead woman’s body stood motionless, almost as if held upright by the very presence of Fran’s crowbar lodged in its brain, but then with a sucking sound the body freed itself from the metal and at last fell to the ground. With the job done Fran was just about to turn away from the lifeless pile of rotting flesh when something glinting on the side of the corpse’s temple caught her eye and made her smile.

  ‘I knew it wasn’t me,’ she mumbled, realising what she was seeing was the true failure of her first strike; for there, exposed by a flap of torn scalp, was a badly dented metal plate in the side of the woman’s head.

  With the belief in her own abilities once again bolstered, Fran jogged back to where Kai was waiting for her.

  ‘P…problem?’ he asked, glancing behind to the crumpled pile of limbs.

  ‘No, everything’s just as it should be,’ she replied, with a wink. ‘Come on, let’s find that way in.’

  ***

  As it turned out, once they had pushed their way through a relatively sparse section of the hedgerow further down the road and doubled back to the single story building, they almost immediately found a broken window near the cashier’s desk that had been hastily covered with a sheet of plywood.

  ‘Just stay close, okay,’ whispered Fran, sliding herself across the dusty cashier’s counter on her bottom before slowly lowering herself one foot at a time into the front of the small gloomy shop.

  Despite very little light coming through the shop’s floor-to-ceiling front windows, Fran could tell her first impressions of the shop had been correct; the proverbial cupboard here was decidedly bare. Of the three rows of chest high shelves crammed into the six-by-six metre area, only the nearest to her held anything other than dust balls, ancient mouse droppings and spider webs; and even then it was only a stack of cellophane wrapped glossy fashion magazines.

  ‘Now, these… we’re taking with us,’ she mumbled, picking up the heavy stack by the surrounding cable-tie and placing it back on the counter.

  Noticing the way Kai glanced at her find she couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘Waste not, want not,’ she whispered, nodding to the pile of magazines. ‘Not ideal or very bum friendly but better than nothing… Oh and if nothing else,’ she continued tapping the cover of the uppermost magazine and the sample sachet of a long forgotten new shampoo attached, ‘Bob, or rather Tom, will thank us for that.’

  ‘Right,’ smiled Kai, wondering just how Tom and their newest companion were getting on back in the cart
. ‘P…pity that’s about it though,’ he went on to say, following Fran as she crossed the front of the shop, checking one empty shelf after another.

  Pausing, Fran looked down at a dark brown stain across the floor; smeared and smudged hand and footsteps covering much of the last aisle.

  ‘Blood,’ she said, looking back at Kai. ‘It’s old, very old from the colour… but someone definitely died here.’

  ‘Yes b…but they’re n…not here now,’ he replied, ‘nothing is.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she agreed, thoughtfully chewing her lip as she doubled back to check the centre aisle again. ‘You’re right, there is nothing here,’ she muttered, walking down the aisle to the back of the shop, ‘and yet still someone went to a lot of trouble trying to hide it…’

  Coming to a stop she picked at a price label stuck to the front of one of the dust covered shelves lining the back wall.

  ‘But why?’ she thought to herself, idly letting the faded label fall to floor. ‘Why make all that effort with the wall if there’s nothing here worth hiding?’

  ‘We’ve got to be missing something,’ she said, looking back at Kai.

  ‘P…perhaps someone just needed a safe p…place for a few days?’ suggested Kai, shrugging his broad shoulders.

  ‘No,’ Fran replied, standing with her hands on her hips, somewhat annoyed with the mystery of it all, ‘that wall took time to build. Whoever made it did it for a reason, they needed to hide this place… and anyway from the state of this place it doesn’t look as though anyone’s used it as a bolt hole. I mean, look,’ she continued, about to wipe her fingers across one of the shelves to point the thick undisturbed layer of dust.

  Suddenly she stopped, frozen mid-action as she stared at the marks in front of her; marks already in the layer of dust that looked decidedly like someone else had recently taken a grip of the shelf.

  ‘Kai,’ she hissed, excitedly waving him over.

  Looking at the scuff marks, Kai walked to the end of the shelf and purposefully placed his hands down; mirroring the position of the previous person’s grip. Testing the weight of the shelves, he momentarily lifted his end off the floor and was surprised to find they were actually lighter than he’d expected them to be.

  ‘And on the f…floor,’ he noted, nodding to the faint marks only just visible amongst their footprints, suggesting the someone had made an effort to lift the shelf into place rather than dragging it and leaving the obvious tracks behind them.

  ‘So this shouldn’t be here,’ smiled Fran, her eyes glinting in the dim light of the empty shop as she patted the shelf. ‘And for some reason, someone’s been very clever,’ she continued, motioning for Kai to move the shelving unit away from the wall.

  Not needing to bother this time about hiding any evidence of its passing, Kai pulled his end of the shelves away from the wall, scraping it along the floor as it went. Once the gap was wide enough he glanced at the space behind and then, slowly looking back at Fran, he smiled.

  ‘Very clever indeed,’ whistled Fran, standing in front of the door marked ‘staff only’ that Kai had just exposed.

  ‘G…guess we should have checked all the w…way round the building outside,’ said Kai, realising if they had then they would have already known about the area at the back of the shop.

  ‘See,’ she whispered, standing on tiptoe to look through a small glass panel set in the door, ‘guess even I make mistakes.’

  ‘Anything?’ asked Kai, wondering what could be on the other side.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she replied, dropping back down from tiptoe, ‘it’s too dark… one way to find out though.’

  ‘Careful,’ Kai whispered, knowing from experience, a closed door could hold back a multitude of horrors.

  ‘Just stand a little way back,’ said Fran, agreeing that should there be any of the Dead inside then she would indeed need some elbow room to deal with them. ‘Ready?’ she continued, waiting for a nod from Kai; her free hand hovering over the door handle.

  Giving her a sharp nod to go ahead, Kai watched as Fran slowly started to turn the handle. With the softest of ‘clicking’ the door suddenly sprung inward, piercing the shadows beyond with a shaft of dim light. With a brief look back that said ‘get ready’, Fran gently pushed the door all the way in; finally propping it open with her right foot.

  Just as she had hoped the room beyond was indeed the stock room for the shop; unfortunately though, the shelves here bore an unhappy resemblance to those out front when it came to the level of stock on them.

  ‘Well at least I can’t smell any of the Dead,’ she thought, disappointedly scanning the nearest empty shelf.

  With the door now fully open, Fran saw a small wooden doorstop just inside the doorway and as she bent down to wedge it under the door to hold it in place she noticed the soft glint of metal coming from the other side of the empty shelf.

  ‘Bingo!’ she silently exclaimed, reaching through to retrieve a small solitary tin of pineapple rings.

  Blowing the dust from the top of the tin, Fran turned back to show Kai her prize, a wide grin on her face. She was just about to slip the tin in her pocket when the sound of clattering metal suddenly came from somewhere deeper in the shadowy stockroom. Instantly Fran and Kai’s eyes locked, their smiles fading as they wondered if they were about to be set upon by the Dead. Slowly and as quietly as she could, Fran placed the tin down on the nearest shelf and rose to her feet.

  ‘Stay here,’ she signalled to Kai, her fingers flexing about her crowbar in her grasp as she stealthily stepped further into the room.

  ***

  For a moment, Kai didn’t want her to go, fearful that he may never see her again and even as the shadows started to swallow her up, he had to stop himself from reaching out to stop her.

  ‘She knows what she’s doing,’ he told himself, watching as she slipped past the far end of the shelf, at last disappearing from sight. ‘She can handle it.’

  And he knew that she could; for the unknown shadows, the lurking corpses hungering for a taste of her flesh, the daily horror and nightmare of survival, these are what made up her world. Yet he could not help but feel a twist of panic bloom in his chest each time she was forced to confront the Dead head on. So many had fallen to their deadly grasp; so many soldiers with weaponry and training well beyond her expertise; if they had been brought down how long could the odds really last in her favour. A young woman, gifted with nothing but a legacy of her father’s martial arts training from all those years ago, surely like the rest of humanity she was doomed to fail, eventually. Almost instantly he thought back to a moment where it was he who had saved her from the deadly horde; where it was his quick thinking that had saved Fran and Tom from being torn apart. Saint Xavier’s boarding school and his life there already seemed like a world away, but thinking of Fran and Tom battling for their very lives in that hallway he could still feel the dread build within him as if he was there, standing looking down at them through the domed glass ceiling once more. Back then he had only met the beautiful young woman a few times after her arrival with the rest of her group but even so, as he had watched her fight what looked to be a losing battle, he knew he needed her to live. Remembering the way the surging water from the large tank on the roof had given Tom and Fran those few precious seconds to push the Dead back, Kai almost missed the soft ‘clunk’ that suddenly came from somewhere in the shadows to his left; almost, but not quite.

  ‘Shit!’ he thought, his hand instinctively tightening about the handle of the machete hanging from his waist.

  With Fran searching in the opposite direction, he knew whatever had caused the noise was certainly not her. So, despite Fran telling him to stay in the doorway, Kai pulled the machete from its sheath and with his heart hammering in his chest, stepped into the storeroom.

  Kai guessed the room to be about two or three times the size of the front of the shop but with very little light and the warren of tall shelves inside throwing whole areas into darker shadow it was hard for Ka
i to gauge its exact dimensions.

  ‘Keep calm,’ he told himself as he edged along the aisle between two empty shelves. ‘Just take it slow and keep calm.’

  After a few strides Kai’s eyes began to adjust to the dim light and although it made it slightly less daunting he still held his free hand out to one side, keeping a grounding contact with the shelves as he went. Somewhere in the opposite corner Kai was sure he could hear Fran slowly but methodically making her way about the room and as reassuring as her presence was to him, it also meant that if she hadn’t come across anything yet then whatever he had heard was still waiting for him somewhere ahead.

  ‘Take it slow and keep calm,’ he repeated, his thoughts a jumble of horrific fleeting images and possibilities. ‘Just keep calm… keep calm… keep…’

  It was then that his mantra froze mid thought; without warning, his left hand had lost the comforting presence of the shelving unit beside him. This in itself wouldn’t have been so surprising, after all he had expected there to be gaps in the shelves, but the fact that as he turned his head he could plainly see his hand hovering in open space meant there was a dim light source coming from just round the corner; a dim light source that he could clearly see was being broken by movement.

  ‘Shit!’ he thought, realising it was going to be up to him to clear the stock room of this unseen menace.

  Taking a steadying yet ineffectual breath to calm his nerves, Kai re-adjusted his grip on the machete and then stepped out in the breach to deal with the unknown. If he had been just a little more experienced in this new world he would have noticed the absence of the tell-tale smell that indicated the presence of any of the Dead. He may have even waited, perhaps watching the shadowy movements, hoping to gauge the best time to reveal himself; and then if and when he did step forward, he may have not made himself such an easy target for the half-filled sack of tins being swung directly at his head.

  ***

  Fran had just made her way to the end of yet another empty row of shelves and was about to turn back when she suddenly heard a loud crashing sound coming from somewhere else in the storeroom, followed seconds later by inexplicable multiple dull thuds hitting the concrete floor.