Ignoring her comment, Phil waited for Tom’s acknowledgment.
‘Tom!’ he repeated.
‘Yeah, Yeah… I heard him,’ he mumbled unconvincingly.
With a sigh, Phil turned back and gathered Snow’s reins up in his hands, knowing Charlie’s orders had probably fallen on deaf ears as far as Tom was concerned. It didn’t take long for the cart in front of them to begin to move off and just as he had been told, Phil soon gave a flick of Snow’s reins to keep the distance between them under a few metres. With a lurch, the cart suddenly jolted forward and as Snow began her long plodding journey that would eventually take them to Saint Xavier’s and the hope of a new life, the group of survivors knew their time at the Carmichael Institute was truly behind them forever.
The Institute had been built eight or so miles from the outskirts of a small town called Tavistock. The old market town, nestled on the twisting banks of the river Tavy, was now an odd mix of intricately carved old grey stonework buildings and more utilitarian modern additions. As the town had blossomed from the original hotchpotch collection of shacks and inns that had surrounded a now ruined medieval Abbey, it had benefitted firstly from the nearby tin mines and then later, as the tin had been exhausted, copper. With a large market square the town had also been blessed with the nearby sheep farmers who came down from Dartmoor to ply their trade of livestock and wool. This bustle of commerce and the needs of the everyday rural people had kept the town alive for centuries but, as was the way of the world, even this was not to last. The coming of the Industrial revolution and the slow but steady departure from rural areas to the towns over the next hundred years had consigned the town’s prosperity to nothing more than a thing of the past. This left the modern people of Tavistock having to rely on perhaps the most lucrative but most flighty trade of all, the tourist. So with a known population of Tavistock already hovering around the twelve thousand mark and taking into account the added influx of tourists, it was not surprising that Charlie was reticent to venture too far into the town whose streets were surely swarming with the Dead.
‘It’s a pity Daniels didn’t do more to clear the Dead around here,’ whispered Charlie, as Star pulled the cart past one of the many rusting wrecks that had been pushed deep into the overgrown roadside thickets.
‘Perhaps it was on his to do list?’ mused Liz, adjusting Anne who was sat on her lap.
‘More to clear the Dead?’ Fran butted in, listening to the hushed conversation between Liz and Charlie. ‘I’ve been to Tavistock… we were sent on a scouting party to see just how bad it was… half of us didn’t make it back. Tavistock may only be a small town but believe me those Dead bastards are everywhere…’
‘Sorry,’ said Charlie, realising his error, ‘I know he was your friend, I didn’t mean to bad mouth him… I… I’m just worried about us getting through safely… that’s all.’
‘But we’re not actually going through Tavistock proper, are we?’ whispered Liz, her arms tightening slightly about Anne’s waist. ‘You did say we were going to by-pass it?’
‘Well… yes, technically we’ll bypassing the town,’ Charlie continued, ‘but the turning we need to take still gets us too close to the red zone for my liking…’
They had all seen the precious maps Charlie was using to navigate their way through the landscape ravaged by the Dead. Over each printed page a myriad of hand drawn symbols and notes had been added, each indicating a specific danger or obstacle to be overcome or avoided. A fallen tree here, a road blocked by mangled traffic there, anything that the reader would need to be aware of was dutifully added whenever encountered. But it was the lightly shaded ‘red’ zones that signalled the real danger. Here the Dead by their sheer numbers held total sway. This was their space and to venture into it meant you had either run out of sane options or were simply crazy. Like a Venus flytrap they would wait, motionless in the streets until one of the hapless living happened to wander among them and then nothing would stop them. Even if you managed to escape their bloody grasp, their unholy attention had been piqued and now nothing would deter them from claiming their pound of flesh. They would blindly drag their rotting carcasses in the direction they had seen the terrified living flee, becoming the wandering Dead, a scourge of ravenous death creeping across the land.
‘Just how close?’ asked Fran, her worried gaze flitting briefly back to Carmella.
‘Here,’ Charlie replied, holding up a folded section of map.
‘May I?’ she asked, taking the map to study it herself.
Pushing aside one of the spyhole covers near her shoulder, Fran manoeuvred the paper in her hands into the beam of light. With her fingers tracing the wriggling line indicating the road they were on, she followed its path to Tavistock and the horde of the Dead that awaited them.
‘Wait,’ she suddenly said, remembering something, ‘you didn’t come this way when you came to the Institute did you?’
‘No,’ said Liz, not liking the way Fran was nervously chewing her lip, ‘we approached from the other direction…’
‘And we need to go down this turning, right Charlie?’ Fran continued.
‘Erm… yes, that’s the one,’ Charlie replied, glancing over his shoulder at the spot Fran was pointing at. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘There’s a bus,’ she said, slowly handing back the map as she visualised the scene she remembered from her doomed scouting party. ‘It’s right on this corner… well most of it is, the rest is hanging over the bridge into the weir.’
‘Fuck!’ grumbled Charlie, taking back the map to study the roads and lanes again. ‘Can we get past it?’
‘I think so,’ she replied, ‘It’ll be a tight squeeze and there won’t be much room to spare… but we should be able to get past if we’re lucky.’
‘I don’t like the sound of us relying on luck,’ said Michael from the back of the cart, ‘and if we’re in a red zone it’s not as if we’re going to be able to get out and guide the horses if something does go wrong.’
Charlie looked back at Michael and knew he was right. If something did go wrong the situation could spiral out of their control far too quickly and Charlie wasn’t sure he was willing to take that risk.
‘Fran you’re the only one who’s been there,’ he said, looking at the young woman he barely knew. ‘Are you sure we can get past… I don’t want to risk lives on just a ‘maybe’… you need to be sure.’
It had been a long time since the ill-fated trip to Tavistock but Fran could conjure up the horrific images of men and women screaming in agony as they were set upon by the Dead. She could still picture the shattered windows of the shops, the burnt and twisted wrecks that littered the streets and the overwhelming stench of death that hung heavy in the air. She can see herself now, as if watching a film from above, running, fighting and killing her way to safety. And yes she remembered being with her sister and the few others that survived the attack crouching by the mangled rear of the bus, its trapped Dead passengers clawing at the windows to be free.
‘Yes,’ she finally said, the image of the bus fresh in her mind. ‘Yes, we can do it.’
Charlie searched the young woman’s face for any signs of doubt or hesitation and was thankfully left wanting. Charlie knew there were no certainties in this world anymore but if Fran believed they could make it past the crashed bus then he would just have to rely on her judgement. They had little choice not to.
‘Good,’ he finally said, turning back to face the road. ‘So we stick to the plan…’
And with that the decision was made.
For the next hour they travelled in silence, the only sounds the rhythmic ‘clip-clop’ of Star’s hooves on tarmac, the creaking of the cart’s wheels as they turned and the gentle patter of rain against its roof. It would take them a little over two hours before they started to encounter the Dead in any large numbers and for the moment the survivors were enjoying the brief peaceful calm before the dangerous storm to follow.
Looking through a
spyhole, Fran watched the passing world of Nature’s greenery carrying on regardless of the fate that had befallen Man. Roadside hedgerows and thickets, growing unchecked and unhindered for the last five years had taken advantage of this respite from human control to spill out into the road, claiming it as new territory. While at their bases a riot of grasses, weeds and wildflowers inched their way ahead of their slower growing cousins, eager to colonize this new ground for themselves. In the once farmed fields beyond the hedges young tree saplings were buffeted in the winds and meadow flowers bloomed, reclaiming the worked soil back as their own. But it was not only the flora that had grasped this chance to flourish at the expense of Man’s disastrous demise. Rats, foxes and wild packs of dogs eagerly snatched decaying flesh from Dead limbs while in the skies above them birds grew fat on the multitude of insects that happily feasted on the sudden abundance of rotting flesh. In fact even as she watched the world pass by a large flock of chattering starlings burst forth from a vast hawthorn bush in a flurry of iridescent jewel-like black feathers. For a few moments she watched their amusing display as, despite the rain, they showed their displeasure by swooping in and darting around Star and the cart she pulled. But the cart soon left the birds behind them and the section of the outside world she was shown through the spyhole reverted back to a million nameless shades of rain dappled green. Turning away from the spyhole, Fran softly asked Carmella if she needed anything. Receiving only a forlorn shake of her head in reply, she looked over to Cam where he was talking in hushed whispers to Michael. There was something about this man that niggled her, not something worrying, not at all, but more like something strangely familiar that she couldn’t pin down.
‘What?’ his raised eyebrows gestured, catching her not so discreetly studying his face.
‘Do I know you?’ she asked, her voice the usual whisper of those who travelled the roads among the Dead. ‘I mean… I know your name… but why do I already know your face?’
‘Oh, don’t start him off,’ whined Michael, comically dropping his head in his hands.
But it was too late. Cam, pulling a hunting knife from a strap on his thigh, flipped it handle end up and held it to his mouth.
‘This is Cameron McDonald, reporting from inside a cart with far too many people in it somewhere just on the outskirts of Tavistock… back to you, Jenny, in the studio,’ he said, his tone suddenly taking on a strangely precise and serious manner.
For a moment her eyes narrowed in concentration as she fought to find Cam’s face hidden in her memory; and then all of a sudden it was there.
‘Shit! Of course you did reporting for the BBC didn’t you…,’ she said, clicking her fingers in realisation. ‘Yeah, you were right there on the front lines… I remember you were with the soldiers when they started trying to control the Dead situation in Manchester…’
‘Yep,’ Cam replied, slightly nodding his head with a smile, ‘that was me… unfortunately.’
‘Fuck! That must have been so awful,’ Fran continued, the horrific scenes she had watched on television suddenly flashing to mind.
‘Hmm,’ Cam replied, the brittle smile dropping from his lips.
Manchester had been the third largest city in the UK and in the space of a few days the Dead had claimed it as their own. Cam, assigned to report from the ever expanding front lines, had watched the armed forces open fire upon the citizens of Manchester. In their desperate attempt to halt the spread of the Dead, panic had overridden reason, and they ended up gunning down the living and Dead alike. But nothing could stop this plague of death that had descended upon the world and even as the soldiers lost control, they were torn apart by the corpses of the very people they had sworn to protect.
‘I remember you were one of the first to question all that bullshit the government was spouting,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You told it how it really was…’
‘Not that it did much good in the end,’ said Cam, with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Millions still died… horribly.’
‘Hey, you saved a lot of people’s lives,’ said Fran, reaching across the cramped confines of the cart to take his hand. ‘You gave them the heads-up they needed to defend themselves… you gave them a chance…’
Fran’s gaze lingered on Cam’s face watching as he visibly pushed the terrifying images back into the dark corners of his mind.
‘I guess so,’ he whispered, looking from the woman’s delicate fingers now wrapped about his own, up into her wide hazel eyes.
As their eyes locked amid the shadows of the cart, something indefinable and unexpected passed between them. Fran could not deny the basic attraction was there, despite Cam being almost twenty years her senior, but it was more of a shared understanding of what each had gone through that connected them. A deep empathy drew her to him and made her want to find out more about this man before her with the friendly clear blue eyes, greying matinée idol good looks and welcoming smile. Suddenly the cart jolted to one side as one of the wheels bumped in and out of a pothole and the moment between them was broken. With the blood flushing to her cheeks, Fran let her fingers slip slowly from Cam’s hand despite her reluctance to break their connection.
‘So…So did you ever interview anyone famous?’ she managed to say, hoping the deep shadows of the cart hid her uncharacteristic blushing.
Cam looked at her, taking in each detail of her face. That she was beautiful was undeniable but there was something else about her that called out to him. She was truly a woman for this new age of Man. A mix of strength, resilience, beauty and compassion, she had battled against the Dead, grieved for the lost and yet still held hope within her for a better life. He somehow knew this was a young woman who would never give up or fold beneath the weight of the troubles forced upon her. She would strive to survive and more than that she would strive to live.
‘Err…What?’ he whispered, abruptly shaken from his thoughts by her question, ‘Err… I… I suppose so. Mainly people in politics though, no-one very exciting… I didn’t really have the finesse to milk the egos of the Hollywood elite.’
Fran simply nodded slowly in reply, keen for him to keep talking but unsure what to say next. Somewhere in the back of her mind she was laughing at herself for being like this. To be acting like a tongue tied schoolgirl while the Dead waited ahead of them was ridiculous to her, yet she was unable to help herself.
‘YAWN!’ said Michael, theatrically waving his hand in front of his mouth.
‘Hey, you may have heard it all before but Fran hasn’t,’ said Liz, giving Michael a look that told him to shut up.
Liz had noticed the way Cam had been looking at Fran even before they had left the Institute and if the two of them managed to find a little company with each other, good luck to them. When you could lose someone at any time, you couldn’t afford to hang about and thanks to the Dead, long courtships were simply a thing of the past. Perhaps when they got to Saint Xavier’s, the couple would have the time and space to get to know each other properly. She certainly hoped so. In fact, once she was sure Anne was safe, Liz wouldn’t mind getting to know someone herself.
‘But we…’ Michael began to say but his words were cut short by Charlie’s urgent hush for silence.
With hand signals he told those in the cart that eight of the Dead had appeared to their right and were shambling towards them. Assuming they had pushed their way through the hedgerows out onto the road, Liz quietly moved aside a spyhole cover to see for herself. As they sat in silence, Star snorted her displeasure as one by one the walking cadavers brushed past her, the overwhelming stench of their decaying flesh burning her nostrils. They all knew if they were quiet the Dead would pass them by oblivious to the presence of the living flesh they craved and sure enough as Liz watched through the spyhole a Dead man dragged himself into view through the falling rain. Beside her, she could hear Carmella’s breathing begin to quicken and sparing a worried glance at the pregnant woman she saw terror dancing wildly behind her wide eyes. It was only when Anne rea
ched out a small hand to comfort the woman that Carmella seemed to be able calm herself. With her eyes now clamped tight, Carmella held onto the Anne’s tiny hand as if her life depended on it and as her lips moved in silent prayer she waited for the Dead to pass. Looking back through the spyhole, Liz found the first Dead man had already moved on only to be replaced by the sorry corpse of another that appeared to have both of his arms missing. With a turn of the cart’s wheels he too then disappeared from view, only to be replaced in turn by another and another.
Normally, this small group of the Dead wouldn’t have given the survivors any cause for concern, in fact they would have been on them as soon as they dragged their stinking carcasses into view but now with no safe haven to fall back to, they were trapped by the limited protection their carts provided. Travelling on unknown roads, through unknown dangers and with only a guess at just what lay beyond the wild elderflower and bramble bushes, the survivors simply couldn’t take the chance. Charlie had been right; they couldn’t stop, not this time. This time the unfortunate Dead would have to rely on some other hapless soul to grant them the peace they deserved.
Within a few more turns of the cart’s wheels the Dead had shambled on their way, unaware of the bloody feeding frenzy that had just slipped through their decaying fingers.
‘Right, they’re well past the second cart now,’ whispered Michael looking through a spyhole drilled into the back wall of the cart at the retreating Dead.
‘Carmella… it’s safe now… we’re all safe…,’ whispered Liz, trying to pry the tightly clenched white knuckled hand from Anne’s squashed fingers.
Looking from Carmella to Anne’s tearful eyes, Fran knew the young girl’s fingers, trapped in Carmella’s vice like grip, must be causing her some considerable pain but she had grown up among the Dead, she knew never to cry out, no matter what.
‘Carmella!’ said Fran with a little more force.
Snapping her eyes open, Carmella looked in horror at the pink little fingers in her grasp.
Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead Page 10