Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead

by Charlick, Stephen

  Hidden in their carts, the group had managed a few hours of stressful nervous sleep and had awoken at dawn to find a small group of the Dead dotted along the road around them. With the smell of smoke and a light mist hovering about them, Cam, Charlie, Tom and Liz had left the safety of the carts to dispatch the ambling cadavers as quickly as they could. Knowing people would want to relieve themselves or at least stretch their legs after a cramped and uncomfortable night trapped in the cart, Charlie made sure the job was exercised with almost military precision. They had each chosen their mark from the closest of the Dead and advanced on them, their weapons ready. Charlie had taken on the largest and freshest looking of the approaching Dead, a hulk of a man in tattered army fatigues. Darting under the Dead soldier’s outstretched arms, Charlie spun and swiped savagely across the back of the corpse’s legs, severing the tendons and sending him tumbling to his knees. With a smooth well practiced motion, he used the momentum he had gathered to spin again, this time stabbing the knife at his wrist deep into the back of the Dead man’s head. With a kick, Charlie released the man’s corpse from the impaled knife and stepped over the body, already dismissing it from his thoughts.

  Looking over, Charlie could see Cam hammering the skull of a female cadaver with his length of heavy piping. She was already on the ground and even as he watched, Cam’s blows gave her the oblivion of true death. Tom, on the other hand, was attacking the Dead with his usual whirling dervish abandon. With his two curved sickles he spun, ducked and slashed, severing limbs and decapitating heads with lightning speed. Unlike Liz, Tom only eliminated the immediate threat the Dead posed. His sickles, old-fashioned curved blades intended more for cutting grass rather than decaying flesh, were far more fragile than Liz’s sword and embedding them into a skull ran the risk of them snapping in two; it wasn’t a risk Tom was willing to take. So as usual, while the bodies fell Liz followed behind, her sword stabbing out their unholy existence.

  ‘Right. All clear!’ called Charlie, as he stepped over the severed remains of a Dead man, who had fallen to Tom’s blades, to knock on the wall of one of the carts. ‘You’ve got five minutes and then it’s back inside while we start the clear-up from last night’s fuck up,’ he continued, pausing to help Carmella down from the cart.

  ‘What a waste,’ whispered Carmella, staring forlornly at the still smoking blackened shell of the Institute.

  Charlie looked over his shoulder at the ruined building and shook his head. Any slim hopes he had harboured of being able to stay and rebuild the Institute quickly faded. During the night the fire had raged through the building and the structural damage was such that one side had been reduced to little more than rubble. This in itself was bad enough but as the masonry collapsed and scattered across the grounds the trees closest to the building had been felled, causing a domino effect that had breached the outer wall. With a large break in the old west wall it would be impossible to keep the Dead out now. The Carmichael Institute could no longer offer them the sanctuary they needed and Charlie knew it was time to find a new home.

  ‘We’ll find somewhere else,’ he said, turning back to Carmella, his hand on her shoulder, ‘somewhere you can have your baby… somewhere safe.’

  Carmella’s hands instinctively moved to her belly, encircling her unborn child protectively and forced a worried smile to her lips.

  ‘Now go with Liz,’ he continued, his own smile mirroring hers. ‘We won’t have long before more of the Dead come.’

  Knowing that what Charlie had said to be true, Carmella nodded and went with Liz and the other women to quickly relieve themselves while they still had time.

  ‘Right, so how are we going to play this?’ asked Michael a few minutes later, tapping a crowbar absentmindedly against his leg.

  ‘Well, it looks like this is just a clear and salvage mission now,’ began Charlie, looking at the assembled group of dishevelled survivors, ‘and as we’re a bit low on weapons I think Liz, Tom, Michael and myself should be the ones to clear the Institute…’

  ‘What? But…’ started Phil, surprised he wasn’t going with them.

  ‘No, Phil I want you here.’ Charlie interrupted, ‘Unless we find any more survivors inside, which I doubt, there’s about thirty or so of the Dead still in there…’

  ‘All the more reason for me to come with you then,’ Phil argued, ‘you need me.’

  ‘Please, Phil, we don’t have time for this.’ Replied Charlie, glancing up and down the road for any signs of more approaching Dead, ‘What I need is for you to be here… I need you to make sure everyone else is safe and if anything happens to us…’

  Charlie didn’t need to finish his train of thought; Phil and the others all knew what he meant. If they were to meet their deaths within the next few hours, it was to be Phil’s priority to keep the others alive and lead them to a new safe home.

  ‘I understand,’ he said solemnly, looking over at Anne as she worriedly followed the conversation of the adults from her perch on the lip of one of the side hatches.

  For the length of a heart beat no-one spoke, each realising it could quite possibly be the last time their little group of survivors were together in their entirety.

  ‘Right,’ said Tom, breaking the moment, ‘it’s not going to get any better the longer we wait… let’s get this party started.’

  As the others began to divide themselves between the two carts, Liz pulled her sister tight into her arms.

  ‘I love you… You be a good girl for Phil and the others,’ she whispered into a head of blond curls. ‘Charlie and I will be back soon… I promise.’

  ‘I’m relying on you,’ she said turning to Phil as he took Anne from her arms.

  ‘Hey, you’ll be back soon enough,’ he replied with a wink. ‘You promised and we’re going to hold you to it… aren’t we Anne, hey.’

  Anne silently nodded her head.

  ‘See… we’ll be fine,’ he continued.

  ‘Arsehole,’ she whispered, reaching up to kiss Phil on the cheek.

  ‘Just get going,’ he replied, giving her rump a friendly slap with his free hand. ‘Go find us something to eat… Girl, I’m starving!’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Liz, reaching behind her to click free the sword on her back from its sheath.

  With that Liz turned to join Charlie, Tom and Michael standing just inside of the open gate.

  ‘Here,’ said Cam, suddenly running up to Michael with a wickedly sharp looking hunting knife in his hand, ‘you’d better take this… just in case.’

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ Michael replied, taking the knife from his friend with a nod.

  With everyone else already hidden safely inside the two carts, Cam darted back, pulled himself up through the open side hatch and turned to watch his four friends disappear from sight beyond the high walls to meet what awaited them.

  ‘Good luck,’ he mumbled, pulling the hatchway closed.

  As he slid the internal bolt closed, Cam turned to Vincenzo, Carmella and Fran, their faces half in shadow.

  ‘Let’s get some light in here, shall we?’ he whispered, moving aside some of the disks covering the spy holes cut into the walls of the cart.

  But his cautious whispers would prove to be too little, too late. For as he had climbed back into the cart his movements had not gone unnoticed and already four of the Dead were slowly dragging their decaying bodies along the road toward the place they had seen the living flesh hide itself.

  ***

  With the gravel crunching slightly underfoot as they walked, Charlie, Liz, Tom and Michael left behind the safety of the carts to begin the ‘clean up’ of the Dead.

  ‘Heads up!’ said Charlie, pausing as he scanned the grounds before them. ‘Three to the left already… and another five on our right.’

  ‘Do we split up or wait for them to come to us?’ asked Liz, readjusting the hold on her blade.

  ‘Split up,’ Charlie began, eyeing the shambling corpses as one by one they slowly took notice that the liv
ing that had suddenly appeared among them, ‘Tom, Michael you go left… Liz, with me…’

  ‘See you in a minute then…,’ replied Tom, already swinging his sickles eagerly at his sides, keen to end the unnatural existence of the Dead men and woman slowly making their way towards them, ‘just holler if you can’t handle your five, OK.’

  ‘Just don’t get yourself bitten, Smartarse,’ smiled Charlie, as Tom and Michael ran off to engage three of the walking cadavers.

  ‘Which do you want?’ asked Liz sizing up the four Dead men and a Dead woman ambling in their direction as fast as their stiff limbs could carry them.

  Of the four male corpses there was little to differentiate between them, they were all of similar height and body weight. While the woman on the other hand, whose neck and chest had been reduced to little more than a mass of torn flesh, was short with a slight frame and build.

  ‘I’ll take the one in the overalls,’ replied Charlie, pointing with his wrist knife to a man on the far left of the group who had a series of mouth sized chunks missing from his face and neck, ‘and then the one behind him dragging his leg… You take the woman and the Dead man in the blue trousers,’ he continued, nodding towards the woman and the corpse of a man who seemed to be only missing an ear.’

  ‘Right,’ began Liz, giving her blade a quick swish through the air to loosen up her wrist, ‘that leaves the one at the back… we should be done before he catches up, so whoever finishes first puts him down.’

  ‘OK, let’s do this,’ he replied, swinging his length of lead piping up onto his shoulder as he stepped forward.

  Within twenty seconds they had walked close enough for each of them to engage their chosen corpses. With a grunt Charlie swung the pipe through the air, his long reach enabling it to connect hard on the right temple of ‘overalls’ man. Knocked off balance but not yet out of action, the cadaver fell to the floor only to immediately begin pushing himself up again. In the brief respite the attempt to right himself gave him, Charlie was already moving onto the Dead man with the limp. One hard kick to his already weakened knee that shattered bone and tore cartilage and Charlie was darting forward ready to finish this corpse’s short lived afterlife. With a sickening wet cracking sound the knife at his wrist plunged through the man’s forehead and after a minute twist to make sure the brain inside was truly ruined, the job was done. Even though this had barely taken seconds ‘overalls’ was back on his feet and already reaching for Charlie again.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ Charlie mumbled, knocking aside a blood caked hand just shy of touching his shoulder. ‘Not today!’

  Another loud ‘crack’ and the length of pipe connected just under the Dead man’s chin, violently snapping his back his head and shattering many of his teeth in the process. The blow must have dislodged the corpse’s skull from the top of his spine for even as Charlie stepped closer to make the killing blow he noticed the cadaver’s head was sat at an odd tilted back angle. Staggering backwards from the impact, ‘overalls’ was now forced to look down his nose, or rather past the gaping hole where it used to be, to see the living flesh he craved. Just how dislodging the skull hadn’t severed the spinal cord, Charlie had no idea but with ‘overalls’ still advancing towards him he knew it really didn’t matter; he had to end this. So after taking a precious second to take aim, Charlie darted forward. With a hefty punch at the underside of the Dead man’s exposed chin, Charlie’s wrist knife easily tore through the dead skin and flesh. Feeling just the slightest pressure as the knife tip initially connected with the base of the Dead man’s skull, Charlie used his strength and momentum to force the blade home. For a second the Dead man’s jaw continued to move impotently up and down, scraping bone against the hard steel but as whatever had brought this man back from death dissipated Charlie pulled his blade free to let the now truly dead weight fall to the ground.

  As swift as Charlie had been at dispatching the Dead, Liz was faster. Glancing over he saw that the Dead man and woman had been reduced to little more than a collection of gore splattered severed limbs and in fact Liz was already advancing on the last remaining male cadaver. Even as he watched, she reached the shambling shell of the man and without even breaking her stride her blade was effortlessly slicing through the air. First a lifeless arm fell to the floor, then a hand and then, with a flash of reflected light breaking through the morning mist, Charlie saw the Dead man’s head tumble to join its departed appendages. Even though technically Liz was not his real daughter, he thought of her as such and her display of skill had caused a bloom of pride to swell within him. Using what knowledge he possessed he had at least given her a fighting chance in this world, a chance that she had not only grasped with both hands but had excelled his every expectation. She had taken his lessons and had practiced, developed and honed them until the very blade itself had become part of her. Sometimes when he watched her fighting even he wondered just where Liz ended and the blade began, such was her skill with the weapon that kept the Dead at bay and inevitably gifted the true death that had been denied them.

  ‘Clean work as ever, Girl,’ smiled Charlie, walking over to Liz.

  ‘Thanks,’ she replied, flicking her wrist to dislodge a stubborn lump of congealed blood from her sword.

  Eventually the offending clot slipped from her blade to land with a satisfying ‘splat’ against an old battered bucket. Just then Michael and Tom jogged over, leaving the three crumpled corpses behind them as lifeless as nature intended them to be.

  ‘Well that’s eight down,’ said Michael, gingerly picking a flap of bloody skin from the end of his crowbar. ‘So… what’s the plan now?’

  ‘It’s a pity there aren’t more of the Dead in the grounds,’ said Tom. ‘Putting them down at close quarters inside the Institute is going to be risky…’

  ‘We get them to come to us,’ Charlie replied, taking the few precious moments of respite to wipe gore from the knife on his wrist. ‘We enter through the kitchens and wait for them there. There’s only one way in from the main building through a set of double doors and assuming some of them were incinerated by the fire there can only be twenty or so still left mobile.’

  ‘And unless they’re all packed in the dining hall, which seems unlikely, we should be able to deal with them one by one as they come through,’ added Liz.

  ‘Right, so that’s the plan then,’ continued Charlie, looking from one face to the next, ‘unless anyone can think of anything better?’

  Liz, Tom and Michael each shook their heads, entrusting Charlie’s experience in the armed forces when it came to such tactical manoeuvres.

  ‘Let’s get busy then,’ nodded Charlie, turning and jogging over to a set of unbroken ground-floor windows facing them.

  So not to trample them underfoot, Charlie skirted left and then right; zigzagging his way through the patches of carrots, beans and beetroot that had been planted. If the stores within the Institute had been ruined they may just be relying on these meagre vegetables to keep them alive. Reaching the building he crouched low just under the windowsill and with his back against the wall he looked out over the grounds; shadowy movement in what was left of the woodland suddenly catching his attention.

  ‘Two more coming this way from the tree line,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the trees.

  ‘Two less to meet inside,’ said Tom, who had just crouched down next to him. ‘I’ll deal with them.’

  With that, Tom was off, running at full speed toward the two shambling figures. The walking cadavers had obviously been caught among the trees as the fire had spread from the building, their now blackened and burned bodies obliterated to such a point it was difficult to tell which sex they had once been. Silently and with deadly speed Tom met the first of the Dead head on, his sickles already slicing through the air, eager to end their unholy parody of humanity. Barely stopping as he sped past the first corpse, the sickle in his right hand tore through the burnt flesh of the creature’s neck, sending its head tumbling. Just where the head ended
up Tom didn’t care, he still had work to do and vengeance to reap. With the second cadaver a few steps ahead of him, Tom crossed his arms at the wrists and as he finally stepped within striking distance he pulled his arms violently back apart, the sickles in his hands instantly transforming into deadly scissoring blades. With the brief sound of crispy skin and burnt flesh slicing, the cadaver barely had chance for a final fetid breath to escape its lungs before its head was being separated from its shoulders. Panting, Tom looked down at the now headless corpse crumpled at his feet.

  ‘Another one,’ he whispered, the smiling faces of his long dead wife and girls suddenly coming to mind.

  At times Tom would hear the whispered pleas of his wife and daughters, their voices as clear as if they stood next to him. They asked for retribution, they pleaded for vengeance and they demanded death. He would gladly honour their requests, each time paying tribute as body after body fell to his blades. Tom knew his wife and daughters were gone but still their voices called out to him and it somehow gave him comfort. Something was wrong with him, of that he was certain, but the simple fact he knew his sanity may have slipped from his grasp gave him solace; for surely only the truly mad are unaware of their state of mind. So he kept these whispered voices to himself, wrapping these ghostly memories about him, pleased to pay silent recompense to his lost family with each of the Dead he dispatched.

  Behind him a short whistle broke him from his thoughts. Turning, he saw Liz crouched by the back door that led to the kitchens, urgently waving him over.