Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead

by Charlick, Stephen

  ‘More to come,’ he whispered, giving the headless corpse one final glance before running back to the others.

  ‘You OK?’ asked Charlie, when Tom joined them. ‘You seemed to drift off a bit out there…’

  ‘Yeah, fine… let’s get this done,’ Tom replied, brushing off Charlie’s concerns.

  ‘I need you to be OK, Tom,’ Charlie interrupted. ‘No bullshit… I’m… we’re relying on you… If something’s…’

  ‘I fucking said I’m OK… OK!’ Tom snapped, a kernel of worry suddenly taking seed.

  If he had really zoned out for so long that they had noticed, perhaps his hold on his sanity was more tenuous than he thought.

  Charlie looked at Tom, his gaze somehow searching for signs of instability within his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ he finally relented, with a nod.

  ‘Well… looks like the kitchen’s empty,’ said Liz, ducking back down from the quick peek she had just taken though the window, ‘I think we’re good to go…’

  ‘No point in us sitting here on our arses then,’ said Charlie, pushing himself up from the ground with a grunt. ‘Now… I wonder if the door’s open?’

  Realising Charlie would be forced to put his length of pipe down to try the door handle, Liz stepped forward.

  ‘Here, let me,’ she said, pressing down the handle.

  With a soft ‘click’ of the lock, the door unexpectedly opened.

  ‘Ready?’ she whispered, looking back at the three men.

  With unanimous nodding, Liz gently pushed the door inward using only the tips of her fingers. Any hope of silently entering the building soon evaporated with the sharp creak of the door’s unoiled hinges heralding their arrival. Liz inwardly cursed their bad luck. She had hoped they could at least properly check out the kitchen before alerting any of the Dead in earshot of their presence. Knowing there was nothing they could do about it now, Liz moved to push the door but when it was almost fully open it suddenly became wedged against something. Stepping slowly into the kitchen Liz peered behind the door, ready for the Dead should one be waiting for her.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she whispered, dismissing the severed arm that now had two of its fingers wedged under the door.

  ‘Well at least the fire didn’t reach this far,’ said Michael, giving the door a hard yank to release it from the jammed fingers so they could close it behind them, ‘although that smell…’

  They all knew what he meant. Hovering under the bitter smell of smoke was the definite sweet odour of cooked flesh, human flesh.

  ‘Must be coming from further in the building,’ whispered Tom, ignoring the smears and bloody handprints along one side of the long metal kitchen table as he edged past it.

  It was clear someone had met their death here. Splashes of blood, chunks of hastily torn flesh and two sets of ominous bloody footprints leading out of the kitchen the only testament to what had really happened.

  ‘Looks like it was going to be rabbit stew for dinner today,’ mused Michael, lifting the lid off one of the large pots sat on a counter next to five skinned wild rabbits.

  ‘Michael!’ snapped Charlie. ‘Focus.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he replied, gently replacing the lid and joining the others stood by a set of double doors.

  The fire may not have raged this far into the building but the smoke certainly had. All along the top of the closed double doors, wispy licks of smoke damage bled upwards towards the ceiling.

  ‘Too much soot on the other side of the glass,’ whispered Tom, trying to see through one of the small glass panels set into each of the doors. ‘Could be one of the Dead the other side, could be twenty…’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ said Charlie, stepping up to the doors.

  Using the length of the pipe in his hand he pushed at one of the doors, opening it slightly. Even through the narrow gap they could see that smoke still hung heavy in the air inside the dark dining hall. Through one of the soot streaked windows a few shards of light struggled to break through the dense gloom of the room, highlighting the swirling eddies of smoke moving on unseen air currents.

  ‘We can’t go in there,’ whispered Liz, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, ‘we won’t last minutes with all that smoke…’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Charlie. ‘So we stick to the plan… get them to come to us.’

  Without further discussion he pushed the door fully open, its base scrapping noisily against some unseen debris on the floor. With a ‘click’ the door locked into its ‘open’ position and Charlie began to push open the other door, never taking his eyes off the dark shadows lurking in the smoke filled room.

  ‘Come and get it!’ he shouted, banging his heavy pipe against the second door the moment it was secured open. ‘Fresh meat for the taking!’

  Almost immediately, among the random popping of still smouldering debris, the distinct sound of shuffling feet could be heard. Then suddenly without warning, emerging from the billowing smoke, the broken silhouettes of three blackened figures came into view. As the smoke parted for the walking cadavers the four survivors could finally see what awaited them. Of the three figures only one seemed to have been completely spared the ravages of the blaze. It was Daniels. Sally had been right when she had said Daniels had been torn apart, the gaping cavity where his intestines had once been was testament to her words. His two Dead compatriots must have at some point caught the full force of the blaze, their chard and burnt limbs cracking to ooze liquid body fat with each movement. How their brains hadn’t already been completely destroyed inside their shells of burnt flesh, Charlie had no idea but such was the tenacity of whatever force kept their lifeless limbs moving.

  ‘I’ll take out Daniels,’ said Charlie, stepping forward to meet the man whose vision of a new beginning had gone so terrible wrong in the space of one night. ‘Liz, Tom deal with the other two… Michael, watch our backs.’

  ‘On it,’ replied Tom, eagerly spinning the sickle in his right hand.

  Liz spared a second to throw Charlie a worried glance. They had discussed this before. Whereas for her and Charlie dispatching the Dead was a necessary task to ensure their safety, Tom, fed by his need for vengeance, had made it personal. He had twisted the need to survive into a need to destroy and that was dangerous. With death around every corner you needed to deal with the Dead with a cool head, calculating each move to bring about the desired end. It was too easy for Tom to be caught up in the moment, lost to his emotions and that’s when mistakes could happen, deadly mistakes. Emotion simply had no place when you were as drastically outnumbered by such a foe as they all were.

  ‘Take the one on the right,’ said Liz, finally nodding to Tom as she stepped past Michael, her sword raised high behind her, ready to strike.

  With the smell of torched flesh burning in her nose, Liz kicked aside a piece of burnt wood resting at her feet and waited for the unfortunate Dead thing to come to her. Of course Tom had already darted forward, all too keen for the sickles in his hand to be bathed in the blood of the Dead once again. With the cracking and creaking of limbs almost destroyed by raging fire, the Dead man in front of her reached out a hopeful but blackened claw towards her. Taking a small step back, Liz casually noticed that a golden wedding ring had somehow managed to stay lodged on one of his destroyed fingers. Instantly dismissing thoughts of who this man may have been or what life he may have once had, Liz coolly sliced her blade through the air, removing the reaching claw and arm at the elbow. Oblivious to his missing limb the Dead man continued in his stumbling advancement to the living flesh he craved but Liz was ready for him and almost instantly her blade was whispering effortlessly through the air again. With only the slightest resistance, her blade sliced through the ruined flesh, tendon and cartilage of his neck, finally separating his head from his equally burnt shoulders; and as his body fell lifeless to the floor Liz’s eyes followed the head as it came to rest by a stack of scorched chairs. Glancing over at Tom, a strange look of satisfaction on his face as he stood
over the crumpled body of the second Dead man, Liz knew she had time to give her now headless Dead man the oblivion of true death he deserved. Stepping over his body Liz looked down at the head that even now sought impotently to bite into her boot. Placing her foot against the head to steady the rocking, she placed the tip of her sword above the shrivelled burnt remains of his ear.

  ‘Sorry…,’ was all she could think of to whisper as she sent the thing before her on his final journey to meet his God.

  With that she stabbed down and after the brief crunching of broken bone, the roaming eyes in the head were at last still.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, turning to watch Charlie trying to move Daniels’ now lifeless body.

  ‘Waste not, want not,’ he simply replied, slipping one of the corpse’s arms from something that looked like a cross between a bullet proof vest and a utility jerkin. ‘Lucky we’re the same size…’

  Slipping the vest over his head, Charlie began to do up the side-straps. It was only when it was on that Liz truly understood why Charlie had ‘robbed’ the body of Daniels of his clothes. Secured in channels across the chest and back were three wickedly sharp looking ice picks.

  ‘Damn, there’s one missing,’ said Charlie disappointedly noticing the empty channel on his chest.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Tom, coughing while he yanked the missing pick from the ruined skull of an unnoticed body half hidden by a scorched table.

  ‘Thanks,’ Charlie replied, taking the missing pick from Tom to test the reassuring weight of it in his hand, ‘Yep, this’ll work for me…’

  ‘No more of the Dead seem to be coming…,’ said Liz, puzzled why more hadn’t answered their call.

  ‘Perhaps the doors at the other end are locked?’ suggested Michael, darting back into the kitchen only to return moments later with a grubby looking tea-towel. ‘I’ll check…’

  Tying the towel over his mouth and nose to block out the worst of the smoke, Michael manoeuvred around the three fallen bodies and using one of the long tables to guide him, made his way through the smoke filled room to the door he knew lay at the far end of the dining hall. At any moment he expected to feel Dead hands upon him, grasping compulsively for his flesh as they appeared from the swirling smoke around him.

  ‘What do you see?’ called Tom from behind him.

  ‘Fuck all,’ Michael mumbled to himself, blinking away the stinging smoke from his eyes.

  ‘I’m almost at the door!’ He continued, calling back as the hand keeping contact with the long table told him he had reached its end.

  Leaving the security of the table behind him, Michael stepped forward making the four strides that would take him to the double doors. Sure enough, by the second step, the smoke parted revealing the doors ahead of him. Slowly he reached out, his fingers gingerly wrapping about one of the handles. Pausing, he could’ve sworn he heard a scratching sound but as more smouldering embers popped and crackled to his right he wrote it off to some unseen debris settling to the floor.

  ‘I’m at the door…’ he called back to the others, steeling himself to pull open the door.

  He was about to open it when the scratching sound reached him again, unnerving him. This was no debris, of that he was certain this time.

  ‘I think… I think there’s something on the other side,’ he said, his voice barely reaching the others.

  ‘Michael, be careful,’ called Liz from behind him.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he mumbled in return, his fist tightening about the crowbar in his hand.

  Taking a deep breath through the stale smelling tea-towel to steady himself, Michael pulled open the door.

  ‘Fuck!’ he yelled as a blackened hand fell through the open door and latched onto his ankle.

  Instantly, as the adrenalin coursed through him, his gaze followed the blistered hand up along a chard sleeve to the severely burnt face of a woman looking up at him, her mouth slowly opening. Instinctively he drew back his arm to smash the skull of the woman looking up at him. It was then that she spoke.

  ‘K…K… Kill m… me,’ she panted. ‘P… Please k… kill me…’

  ***

  ‘Vincenzo!’ whispered Carmella, her fingers nervously tightening about her husband’s wrist.

  ‘Non preoccuparti, Carmella. Tutti saranno ben,’ he whispered back, trying to calm his wife’s justified fears while the sound of Dead hands banging against the walls increased.

  ‘Cam, we must do something… it is not safe,’ he continued, switching back to English.

  The Dead had seemingly appeared out of the blue shortly after Charlie and the others had disappeared beyond the walls of the Institute. What had started with one set of Dead hands clawing impotently at the walls of the cart had, within the spate of a few minutes, turned into a full-on assault.

  ‘They appear to only be at the back and one side,’ Cam whispered back, the fear in his eyes belittling his calm tone. ‘There’s at least eight out there and we need to deal with this before their calls attract even more…’

  They all knew this was how many of the living finally met their end. Afraid to deal with the Dead until they had to, many left it simply too late. All it would take was one of the Dead to catch sight of the living and they would pound ceaselessly to get to them until the very flesh fell from their bones. Their activity and desperate moaning calls would always attract more of their Dead brethren and so the problem would increase until, by their sheer number, the Dead would prevail.

  ‘Let me help,’ said Fran, unhappy to entrust her life in the hands of these two men she barely knew. ‘Just give me a knife…’

  ‘You’ve nothing on your feet,’ replied Cam, peering at her feet which he could tell had been left blistered and bloody after her flight from the burning Institute the previous night. ‘All it takes is for you to stand on a bit of broken glass or a sharp stone and they’ll be on you…. and anyway, once Vincenzo and I are out there I’m sure Phil and the others will come to help.’

  ‘Fran, please… you will keep Carmella safe for me,’ Vincenzo added, his words a statement rather than a request.

  With her fingers subconsciously reaching down to tentatively trace the series of cuts and burns on the souls of her feet, Fran finally nodded. As much as she wanted to deal with the Dead herself, Cam was right, if she were to stumble it could result in terrifying and deadly consequences.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but if you’re going to do something, do it now…’

  ‘Agreed. Vincenzo, you ready?’ Cam asked, his hand hovering over the bolt on the side hatch.

  ‘Si, Cam,’ he simply replied with a stern nod.

  Giving Carmella’s hand a final squeeze and a kiss before moving as close behind Cam as he could, Vincenzo knew if he was to secure the safety of his wife and unborn child he had no option but to do this.

  ‘Here…’ said Cam, turning to pull a knife from a box under one of the benches and handing it to Fran. ‘Just in case…’

  Fran looked from the large serrated blade in her hand back up into Cam’s clear blue eyes.

  ‘Good luck,’ she replied, holding his gaze.

  Raising his eyebrows and forcing a smile to his lips, Cam turned and silently pulled the bolt across. Almost instantly the inside of the cart was bathed in cool morning light as the two men quietly lowered themselves out onto the road. Fran instinctively moved to the open hatch and pulled it closed, securing the bolt once again.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ she whispered turning to Carmella, the pregnant woman’s tear filled eyes highlighted by a shard of light coming through one of the spy holes.

  ‘Si,’ she sadly whispered in reply.

  Outside, the moaning of the Dead was enough to chill the strongest of resolves but the two men knew they had no choice; the Dead had to be silenced. Sparing a quick glance over his shoulder, Vincenzo hoped Phil and the others in the second cart were about to join them when Cam suddenly placed a hand on his shoulder, making him jump. Using hand signals, Cam told him they would edge
to the end of the cart and grab the first of the Dead. Hopefully if they were quick and quiet they could pull one of the Dead round to their side unseen by any of the others. Well, that was the plan anyway.

  Now that Cam stood ready to pounce, his gaze locked onto a Dead hand that had hooked around the corner merely centimetres from his face, his resolve in the plan began to evaporate. He knew that for every second he waited the chances of the plan working decreased, so with a quick shaky intake of breath, he made a grab for the hand. With Cam’s fingers tightened about the cold cadaver’s wrist he felt the mould covered skin begin to stretch and tear under the force of his pull and then suddenly, quicker than he expected, he was face to face with the corpse. For a second the Dead man looked at him, his decaying features transforming into a look of surprise, a look far too human for Cam’s liking. Then, without thinking, Cam tugged on the Dead man again, pulling him towards him and beyond the sight of any of his Dead comrades. Keen to be closer to the living flesh that consumed his very existence, the Dead man willingly obliged. With his milky gaze fixed on Cam the cadaver was oblivious to the foot stuck out to trip him and as he fell to the road in a heap of tattered rags and emaciated limbs Vincenzo’s club was already flying through the air to smash down onto his skull. With a wet ‘crack’ the Dead man’s skull split, sending dark putrid decaying brain matter splashing across the road surface.

  Panting, Vincenzo looked up at Cam and a brief nervous smile twitched at his lips. Brief, for as his eyes flicked over Cam’s shoulder he saw another two of the Dead had inadvertently followed their cadaverous brother and with them his smile was gone.

  ‘Cam!’ he managed to say as the first of the Dead, a woman, reached out a filthy claw to grab his friend.

  Spinning his head around, Cam’s reaction was a fraction too late and as the hungry cadaver lunged toward him, its slug like tongue lolling inside a blackened gaping maw, he knew he had neither the space or time to swing his crowbar to save his life. So he did the only thing he could think of, he threw himself backwards to the ground, taking the Dead woman with him. Landing hard on his back and knocking the air out of him, Cam struggled to keep the Dead woman’s snapping jaws away from his face. Above him he could hear the sounds of running footsteps coming from the second cart and Vincenzo fighting with the second Dead figure just to his left. Suddenly the Dead woman’s weight was lifted partially off of him and he felt a sudden spray of something wet and stinking splash across his face. Fighting the urge to vomit, he swiftly pulled himself out from under the Dead woman’s body just in time to see Fran yanking the hunting knife free from the back of the now lifeless woman’s skull.