As Charlie concentrated moving Delilah to the left and right along the damaged road, Liz looked through one of the spyholes. Like most of the small roads they would be travelling on, this one had high banks of overflowing hedgerow and bramble. Come autumn she would have to talk to Charlie about making a trip to collect the bountiful harvest of blackberries, rosehips, damson and elderflower berries that would be there for the picking. But these high banks could hold danger, just like everywhere else in this dead world. More than once she had seen one of the Dead appear out of nowhere, stumbling into the road from where it had stood hidden for who knows how long, drawn to the sounds of the living. Looking through the hole every dark patch of shadow or collection of branches, briefly became one of the Dead, until she looked closer. This often happened to people if they stayed within the safety of the Convent walls for a while, being beyond an immediate rescue the walls offered, they became a little over zealous. As they turned a corner Charlie suddenly pulled Delilah to a stop.
‘Looks like we’ve got company,’ he said, indicating the rotting corpse dragging itself along the road in front of them.
The thing was in such a bad shape it was hard to tell whether it had once been a man or a woman. Thin lank hair hung in patches from the mottled grey skin stretched taut over its skull. Its cheekbones had broken through the papery skin on its gaunt face, bleached by the sun over time. With the lower half of its body gone, the Dead thing pulled itself along by its twisted and broken hands, trailing dried and withered entrails behind it. As it slowly moved forward reach by reach, its deep set eyes scanned side to side looking for signs of life. Forced to search continually for live flesh by a compulsion that defied the law of nature itself, the living corpse would drag its rotting body ceaselessly. With each painfully slow step of its journey, it let out a pitiful moan. A sound so full of desperation and hunger it filled Liz with both sympathy and horror.
‘Do you want to get this one?’ Charlie asked.
‘I’ll just check through the top hatch first, make sure there’s no other dangers around,’ Imran said, as he stood up to unlock the door in the ceiling. Flipping the hatch open Imran scanned the surrounding area for more of the Dead.
‘All clear,’ he said and swiftly Liz jumped down from one of the side doors. Landing silently on the cracked road she drew her sword.
With a few whispering swipes of the blade she readied herself to end the Dead things torment. As she began to walk toward it, she froze mid step. A low growling sound suddenly came from her left, deep in the foliage. A sound that indicated a danger worse than the decrepit corpse crawling in the road before them. She knew if a pack of wild dogs were around, this situation had just become a lot more precarious. Slowly turning her head to the patch of bushes the sound had come from, she backed up until she could feel the cart touching her shoulders. Delilah, also sensing the danger began snorting and stamping her front hooves in worry.
Knowing something was wrong, Imran said in low whisper, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Dogs,’ she said.
With that one word, the other two in the cart went on alert. If a pack attacked Delilah they may not be able to keep them off. Then the growling changed pitch from angry to a sound that indicated attack was imminent. Imran drew an arrow from his quiver and placed it in his bow. At that moment a large yellow shape broke cover from the bushes at high speed, barking wildly. Liz held her sword high, ready for attack. But the shape, which she could now see was a fast moving golden retriever darted past and on towards the corpse ahead of her. The large dog was old, obviously starving and its matted mangy fur was patchy and covered in dirt. The dog skidded to a stop in front of the Dead thing. As the dead hands reached for the animal, the dog pounced, its strong jaws clamping around the corpses neck. Liz watched as the dog worried the dead creature’s neck back and forth, until with an audible click its jaws came together. With the head coming free, it rolled along the road and into the overgrown shrubbery. Coming to a stop its eyes turned towards Liz, the living flesh it so hungered for. Showing no concern for the loss of its body, the head still moved its jaw in a macabre chewing motion. The now still torso fell lifelessly to the road while the dog transferred its grip to one of the arms. The dog turned so it now faced Liz and those in the cart. Emitting a low growl warning to keep away, it pulled the body back into the bushes from which it had come. To make sure the head wouldn’t become a nasty ankle high surprise for someone, Liz quickly ran to the where it had come to rest. With one sharp downward stab, she plunged her sword into the rotting skull, destroying the putrid brain within.
‘What just happened there? Why didn’t it go for me or Delilah?’ Liz asked, as she climbed back in the cart.
‘Well, the mutt looked quite old. Perhaps it could still remember the living as friend rather than food, who knows? Anyway, we were lucky that time. If it had been a pack we could’ve been in real trouble,’ Charlie said, as Delilah calmed down and began moving forward again.
Delilah pulled the cart through the small winding broken roads for the next hour, her living cargo sweated in the airless wooden box behind her. Soon they reached the first few of the abandoned cottages that signalled they had reached the village outskirts. Overgrown gardens, once cared for and picturesque, were now a riot of blooming colour. Huge rose bushes and flowering shrubbery growing unchecked, battled for space with weeds and wild flowers. Cracked garden paths, their disrupted stone work forced apart by tenacious roots, led to the sad and weather-beaten homes. Long since faded floral print curtains hung through broken windows, their tattered remains fluttering in the light breeze.
As the cart passed a small dilapidated cottage called ‘Morningside’, Liz could just see through the gap in the rose bushes that had once shaped an archway around the door. As with all the houses in the village, its front door was missing and nature, knowing no boundaries, had begun reclaiming the inside of the house too. As if to wipe the existence of Man from its memory, grasses and flowering weeds had seeded in the hall carpet, while ivy made its way inch by inch up the walls. In the shadows she could just about see the old dark brown stains that arched across the peeling wall paper. Someone had died here Liz thought, as she realised the marks were long dried blood stains. Someone had made a last stand here, fighting with neighbours or loved ones, turning this small idyllic home into a scene of carnage and horror. Delilah plodding onward left ‘Morningside’ behind only to pass the next house and the next, each had been a place where the living had fought the Dead, only for the Dead to ultimately win.
Liz closed the cover back over the eye hole she had been looking through. The sight of the ruined little homes always made her think of the small house she had shared with Anne and her parents all those years ago. She clung onto every detail she could, the memories a tie to a better happier life. She could still see in her mind’s eye her mother’s collection of small figurines that had been lined up along the window ledge in the living room. The small shed that smelled of oil and wood, in which her father had stored his assortment of tools and bicycle parts. She could describe in detail the floral design on their kitchen tiles or the exact shade of blue of the hallway carpet. To forget seemed a betrayal of her mother’s sacrifice. So she would hold onto these glimpses of the past and would never let them go. Shaking herself from her thoughts she reopened the eye-hole. She needed to concentrate on what could be outside, not lose herself in the past. Delilah was just pulling them past the village pub. The Falcon Inn had clearly been where the surviving villages had tried to make a desperate last stand against the Dead. Some cars, now old and rusted, with weeds growing through the shattered windows, had been parked in a small semicircle to form a barricade around the front of the Inn. Tables and chairs had been piled against broken windows to hold out the Dead but to no avail.
Liz had seen this a thousand times. In desperation the survivors had unknowingly trapped themselves in with no means of escape. One by one they would have died in there, as dead hands pushed their way th
rough reaching for them. Now, little more than a burnt out ruin, the Falcon Inn was a testament to the misplaced hope the living had in those first few weeks. Assuming they could just wait it out for an army or Government rescue that never came, many had shut themselves away in ludicrous bolt holes surrounded by the Dead, condemning themselves to a slow death or madness. As Delilah pulled them past the Inn, its scorched sign with a peeling painted falcon creaking in the slight breeze, Liz wondered if any other of the locals had survived the devastation. Apart from the Sisters and Crazy Jackson, everyone else had found the village of St Mawgan, and the Convent nearby purely by chance years later.
Albert Jackson had been on a small trawler fishing off the coast when all hell broke loose on the mainland. Desperate to get back to his wife, Sarah, he took the small inflatable dingy with one other fisherman. Leaving his other workmates on the trawler, deciding their own fate, the two set off for land. Unprepared for the total carnage that awaited them when they finally reached shore, the two still managed to fight their way along the coast towards home. After four days of pure horror, they went their separate ways, each hopeful their own villages would have somehow been passed over by this wave of death. By the time Albert reached the quiet village of St Mawgan, death freely walked its streets wearing the faces of those who had once been his friends. As he smashed skull after skull of these slow walking dead, he painstakingly cleared the village of these abominations. He would dart from hiding places taking out a few at time, then run off, doubling back behind them to get a few more before escaping again. He set up base in the small primary school, its high iron railings keeping out any of the dead that wandered into the village. But realising that once they had seen him, the Dead would stand there reaching through the railings for ever, he decided he needed to adapt this new home. Going house to house he began removing doors and securing them to the railings. He transformed the school into a safe haven for himself beyond hungry Dead eyes. When the day came that he finally found his wife’s animated corpse stumbling down the road towards him, moaning with arms outstretched, he was unable to find within himself the strength to do this last deed for her. So weeping, he bound her arms and pulled her to the small Primary school, locking her in a store cupboard. Each day he would have one sided conversations with her through the small safety glass window set in the door. Giving himself over to this small insanity, he had kept his decaying wife this way ever since. When Charlie had found out about this he asked Jackson if he wanted him to put his wife to rest. But by then something had twisted in Jackson’s mind, no longer seeing his wife as the walking cadaver she was and he refused. After many arguments, Charlie had relented but insisted Albert give him the key to the cupboard door. If he was going to keep his dead wife, Charlie wanted to be sure she would never leave her small prison. Since then many at the Convent simply referred to Albert as Crazy Jackson. Albert knew they thought he was odd, staying in the school when there was a safer home for him at the Convent but he couldn’t leave Sarah here alone. He knew what he had done must seem deranged to them but he would rather have this last part of her with him than nothing at all. Apart from this one oddity Jackson was quite rational. He had dug up the playground and planted vegetables. He reared a small flock of chickens and was one of the few willing to go out into the countryside on foot foraging for food on his own.
As Delilah pulled the Cart up alongside the door covered school railings, Charlie brought her to a stop.
‘We’ve got another one,’ Charlie said, tutting in annoyance.
The Dead man’s black skin had turned to a mottled ash grey and a sickening greenish mould bloomed across one side of his face. From the tattered remains of his filthy suit, Liz assumed he had been some sort of business man before he had died and she could just about tell that his shirt had once been white but was now dark and stained with long dried blood. His lower jaw was missing, having been torn away either before or after he joined the ranks of the Dead. With no jaw to keep it in his mouth, his dark black tongue lolled from the gaping hole like a monstrous slug. The Dead creature must have seen Jackson at some point because it pawed at the barricade with a painful desperation, its tongue moving back and forth each time his decaying hands clawed against the doors.
‘I’ll get this one,’ Imran said, flipping the top hatch open.
Liz watched through the front slit as an arrow flew from Imran’s bow direct to the Dead man’s head. With a sickening thump, the arrow punctured the rotten skull and the now lifeless corpse collapsed to the pathement.
‘Clear,’ Imran said, as he made a check for any other dangers.
Jumping down through the back hatch Liz ran over to the corpse. Placing a booted foot on its ruined head, she pulled the arrow free and handed it back to Imran who had joined her.
‘Thanks,’ he said, wiping the tip clean on his trouser leg and replacing it back in the quiver on his back.
‘Well let’s see if Jackson’s home,’ Liz said, reaching down to a bucket of brightly coloured plastic balls.
Unlike at the Convent, Jackson didn’t have the luxury of being far from main roads. Here in the village, the Dead could appear stumbling down the small twisting lanes at any moment. So rather than a bell that could so easily be heard as a dinner gong by the Dead, any visitors would throw a ball over the railings to get his attention. Grabbing a yellow ball from the bucket Liz tossed it high over the wall. As she heard the ball land on the other side of the barricade, she heard an unexpected yapping sound, followed by Jackson saying something she couldn’t make out.
‘Who’s there?’ Jackson called over the railings.
‘It’s Liz from the Convent Mr Jackson, Charlie needs to talk with you,’ she replied.
With a clanking of chains, Liz could hear Jackson opening the school gates.
‘Imran, you watch Delilah and I’ll have a chat with Jackson,’ Charlie said, as he climbed down from the cart.
‘Will do.’
Leaving him watching out for more of the Dead, Liz and Charlie went inside. As soon as they were through Jackson quickly closed the gate behind them. Jackson was looking thinner than the last time she had seen him and Liz wondered if the Convent could spare him some food to keep him going. He may not be part of the actual Convent community but they classed him as a friend and wouldn’t let him simply starve in front of them. Surprisingly, in his arms he held a small black puppy, that was wriggling to get down.
‘Hello Mr Jackson, and who do we have here?’ Liz asked, referring to the puppy.
‘Oh, I found him in the woods and I figured as he was so young, I could train him to be a guard dog. He can come get me if someone throws a ball over the gate and I don’t see it, good idea, yeah? I’ve called him Toby,’ he said, putting the puppy down.
Immediately the small dog ran off and began playfully chasing a chicken round the converted playground among the growing vegetables.
‘Well I didn’t say he was trained yet. Toby stop that!’ He said, calling the dog to him.
Jackson was late middle age but the years of only just having enough food, had aged him badly. His wild grey beard, barely hid his sunken cheeks and his thin greying hair hung limply to his shoulders. Liz thought the puppy would be good for Jackson. If he refused to join them at the Convent, at least Toby would give him some living companionship and who knew he may finally be able to let his wife go.
‘Morning Jackson, how’s things?’ Charlie asked.
‘Good, good Sergeant. No problems, but I think you’re about to ruin my day aren’t you,’ Jackson replied, crossing his arms.
‘Now why would you say that,’ Charlie said, with a smile.
‘Well why else would you be here, hmm?’
‘Fair point… because there is a reason we’re here. We found a survivor who had a run in with some Raiders, they killed his brother and now a child’s missing, probably dead by now. So I thought we should warn you. Just in case.’
‘Oh crap!’ Jackson said, as Toby played with one of his shoe
laces, jumping back and forth with the lace in his mouth, ‘Why can’t those bastards give it a rest. Life’s a struggle enough as it is without them making it even worse for everyone else.’
Bending down he picked up Toby and began stroking him, trying to calm the boisterous puppy down.
‘Well, thanks for the heads up. I’ll keep an eye out.’
‘Oh, and we had a run in with an old retriever earlier,’ Charlie continued, ‘so there may be a pack running wild in the woods. I’d avoid any foraging trips just for the moment, unless you fancy becoming walking dog food.’
‘You’ll keep them off, won’t you boy,’ Jackson said, smiling as he turned Toby so he could look the puppy in the face.
‘Well, we just thought we’d let you know, so you could be prepared,’ Liz said, scratching Toby behind the ear.
Sometimes Jackson’s attitude to his own safety could be a little reckless. Liz thought keeping Sarah decaying in the cupboard was holding him to a life that no longer existed, and if you had nothing tying you to the present, you had nothing left to lose.
Six Days With the Dead Page 9