Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead

by Charlick, Stephen

  ‘Time to go!’ called Fran from beside her, tugging on Liz’s arm.

  ‘Do you forgive me? Please forgive me?’ came Adrian Porrow’s sobbed and pitiful pleas over and over again as he moved among the Dead women in the room. ‘Please, say that you forgive me… please… please say that you…’

  Suddenly a wet choking scream echoed through the shadowed room causing Liz’s breath to catch in her throat. Instantly she knew what the foolish old man had done. In his need to put things right he had removed the hoods from the Dead women and girls and in doing so he had condemned himself to become one of them.

  ‘Liz!’ screamed Fran, pulling her to the doorway.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Liz, urgently pulling her arm from Fran’s grasp, ‘My sword! Just get Anne to the door!’

  ‘Leave it!’ Fran started to say but already Liz was darting across the basement to the table under which Abby’s hooded and bound corpse still struggled.

  In the few seconds it took Liz to grasp the strap of her sheathed sword Adrian Porrow’s hysterical screams had become little more than grunts of complete unbelievable agony. Barely audible over the wet sound of skin and muscle tearing and the guttural almost animalistic slobbering of the Dead as they fed, Liz could still hear the man intermittently pleading for their forgiveness. From his screams it was clear forgiveness was not going to be forthcoming for Adrian, these cadavers wanted their proverbial pound of flesh and nothing would stop them from taking it.

  She was just turning away from the table when his choking cries abruptly stopped. She could still hear the excited moans of the Dead, their blood covered hands savagely tearing fistfuls of flesh from the man’s mutilated body to greedily fill their gaping maws, but she instinctively knew Adrian Porrow was beyond caring now. Adrian Porrow was dead. Liz realised they had but seconds before the Dead women and girls lost interest in their bloody feast, no longer finding the lifeless flesh as enticing as they once had. She knew they would move out and seek new warm flesh to gorge themselves upon at any moment and she knew as sure as night followed day, minutes later whatever was left of Adrian Porrow would be joining them.

  ‘Liz! Move!’ Fran screamed, grabbing Anne by her small hand and pulling her to the only door that promised escape from a horrifying and nightmarish death.

  Snapping herself into action Liz sped across the room, deftly weaving past the mishmash of mouldering boxes, partly dismantled electrical fans and old paint tins until she was barely a step behind Sally running after Fran and Anne out of the basement. Reaching the doorway Liz briefly glanced back to the room that had claimed Adrian’s life and in that instant she saw a slack lifeless face looking back at her, a face she recognised. For there, among the other Dead women pushing themselves into the room, naked and with her gore covered fingers latched onto the doorframe for support, was Jade, the sheep farmer’s missing daughter.

  It was obvious to her now Baxter and Parker had not simply limited their sick harem to the Dead women that they found pawing at the gates of Saint Xavier’s but instead had actively gone in search of others to satisfy their perverse desires. It had clearly been these young men that had talked their way into Jade’s home, only to repay her and her father’s kindness with violence and abuse. Whether they had taken Jade under Kyle’s orders to simply add to the number of women at Saint Xavier’s or for the soul purpose of using her cadaver for sex, she would never know but the dark bruises about the corpse’s throat told Liz that Jade had left this world with someone’s hands tightening about her neck, strangling the life out of her. But Liz had no time to deal with the burning anger that bubbled away inside her, for even as she tore her eyes away from the sight of Jade’s decrepit and bruised cadaver other Dead women and teenage girls in various states of decay swarmed across the basement towards her.

  ‘Shit…’ Liz said under her breath, praying they could get to the door at the top of the stairs in time to trap the horde of Dead women behind them in the basement.

  With the sound of their thundering footsteps almost drowned out by the moaning of the encroaching Dead, Liz was relieved to see Fran was already doing her best to hurry Anne’s small legs up the flight of stone steps. Following only a few paces behind them was Sally and Liz could tell the woman was only just managing to restrain herself from pushing past Fran and Anne to ensure her own survival.

  ‘Come on!’ growled Sally, suddenly darting forward to scoop Anne up into her arms so she wouldn’t have to slow her own pace down.

  Sparing a brief glance back at Sally to make sure she was able to still climb carrying Anne’s extra weight, Fran’s eyes widened in horror at what she saw just over Liz’s shoulder.

  ‘Liz! Hurry!’ she screamed.

  Liz didn’t need to look to know the Dead women had already entered the corridor behind her and were making their way in keen pursuit of the living flesh trying to escape them. Even as her foot hit the first of the steps, she knew she may need to fight for her very life in the next few seconds so she reached behind her to click free her sword.

  ‘Fuck,’ she snapped, suddenly realising the close confines of the narrow hallway made it impossible for her to draw the full length of her sword from its sheath.

  Cursing her stupidity for not pulling the blade free back in the basement when she had had the chance, Liz jabbed the blade back into place with a ‘click’ and continued to run for her life. Ahead of her Fran had already reached the top of the staircase and with a shove the door flew open, banging loudly as it collided with the other side of the wall.

  ‘Come on!’ she screamed down to Liz while Sally carrying Anne sped past her out into the tiled hallway.

  The cries of the Dead women were almost deafening now and as Liz came to the top of the staircase she knew at last hope lie only a few paces ahead of her but as she sped up the final few steps she saw the shape of two men suddenly looming into view behind Fran.

  ‘Fran!’ Liz cried, her hand reaching out as one of the men made a grab for her.

  But Fran would not be caught out a second time by the guards of Saint Xavier’s and as a hand landed roughly on her shoulder she spun in its grasp and thrust upwards with the heel of her palm. With a sickening ‘crunch’, cartilage broke and flesh tore under the force of her impact with Baxter’s nose.

  ‘Fuck!’ he cried, his hands automatically letting go of Fran to cup his bleeding and ruined nose.

  In that brief instant Liz saw her chance. Reaching forward she grabbed a fistful of the young man’s jacket and then, bracing her foot against the top step for leverage, used all her strength to pull the bleeding man towards her. Caught off guard by the unexpected attack, Elliot Baxter stumbled through the doorway. Using his gathered momentum, Liz gave the young man a hard shove with her shoulder to ensure he fell past her. With a cry of surprise and horror Elliot Baxter tried to throw out his arms to stop himself but it was too late, he was already plummeting down the staircase toward the reaching Dead hands so eager to embrace him. Tumbling head over heels against the stone steps he felt something snap and tear in his right arm. Yet this was the least of his concerns and in fact he barely had time to register the pain of his radius snapping in two before he barrelled into the Dead horde awaiting him. With an ear piercing scream the Dead women tore into his flesh and the last Liz saw of Elliot Baxter before he was swallowed amid a sea of reaching arms, grabbing hands and snapping jaws was his face contorted by terror and pain looking up at her with a Dead woman’s mouth clamped onto the soft flesh of his cheek.

  ‘One down,’ Liz said to herself, turning to slam the door closed behind her.

  Instinctively her hand reached for the top of the door expecting to find a securing bolt but she realised to her sudden horror there wasn’t one.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ she said, spinning to see Fran who had already disabled Parker with the same unexpected speed and force that she used to deal with Baxter.

  ‘He won’t keep them busy for long,’ she continued, gesturing with her head to Baxter
’s dying screams while finally pulling free her sword from its sheath, ‘and then there’ll be no stopping them… we’ve got to move!’

  ‘What about him?’ asked Fran, nodding to Parker who lay at her feet nursing a shattered knee cap as she slipped his quiver of arrows over her shoulder.

  For a second Liz contemplated trying to help the young man looking up at her with pain and fear in his eyes but then the image of Jade smiling and happy in a photograph her father had cherished until his final days popped into her head and the decision was made.

  ‘Leave him,’ she flatly said, already stepping around Parker, a look of pure shock and panic on his face.

  ‘Please,’ he begged reaching out to Liz as she took Anne’s hand, ‘you can’t leave me… you can’t just fucking leave me here like this!’

  ‘Come on,’ said Liz, ignoring his pleas. ‘We’ve got to find the others and get to other cart.’

  ‘Please… don’t do this!’ he cried, trying to pull himself along the tiled floor after them, his words punctuated with painful gasps each time he moved his shattered knee. ‘I… I don’t want to die… not like this… please… I… I don’t want to come back as one of those fuckers… please!’

  But Liz had made up her mind. This was not spiteful revenge or needless torture, this was justice. It was justice for the countless women that had begged him for their lives only for their own pleas to go unheard, it was justice for the Dead women who even in death were denied their humanity as he groped and probed their intimate flesh for his pleasure and most of all it was justice for Jade and her father.

  ‘Please!’ he screamed again.

  ‘Can you even use that?’ Liz asked Fran as they ran along the corridor, nodding to the long bow she had taken from Parker.

  ‘Please… Fuck! Don’t let them fucking eat me!’ Parker continued to cry, his words descending into terrified sobs. ‘For God’s sake don’t let them eat me…please…’

  Without answering Liz, Fran abruptly stopped, turned, swiftly pulled an arrow from the quiver on her back and took aim on Parker. With a ‘twang’ the arrow flew from her bow and lodged itself at an angle in the doomed man’s neck. She may have saved him from a horrendous death but she had made sure he would not escape death itself; for before she was even turning back to face Liz, Parker was gulping down desperate breaths through the choking life blood filling his lungs and pumping through his shaking fingers.

  ‘That answer your question?’ she snapped, turning back to face Liz.

  ‘It was more than he deserved,’ said Liz, briefly locking eyes with Fran.

  ‘I know,’ Fran replied, pushing Liz forward. ‘Come on we need to find the others… we can argue about it later, let’s just get out of here first.’

  Behind them the ‘bang’ of the basement door hitting the panelled wall next to it suddenly echoed along the corridor. The fleeing women knew they did not need to turn to know the Dead horde had made swift work of Elliot Baxter’s flesh or that even now the hungry corpses were pushing past each other to claim Saint Xavier’s and its inhabitants as their own, no, they simply needed to run, which is just what they did.

  ***

  ‘I wish this bloody rain would let up,’ said Tom, peering through one of the spyholes to watch the drenched countryside pass by.

  ‘Why? Did you fancy stopping for a picnic?’ asked Phil, idly picking at a blister on the palm of his left hand.

  ‘No, but…’ Tom began to say.

  ‘Tom, he’s taking the piss,’ interrupted Charlie, glancing over his shoulder with a smile on his face.

  At this Tom made a ‘harrumph’ sound in the back of his throat and crossing his arms, gave Phil one his best ‘not amused’ glares.

  ‘Oh, cheer up, man,’ chuckled Phil, reaching over to give Tom’s crossed arms a friendly shake. ‘God, you’d think with the Dead at every turn just waiting to rip out our guts that you’d develop some sense of humour… shit, it’s about all we’ve got left.’

  ‘Some things just aren’t…’ Tom began to reply but he was abruptly shushed to silence by Charlie.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Phil, his voice barely a whisper as he leant forward to see over Charlie’s shoulder.

  ‘More Dead… but… something’s…. I don’t know… something’s wrong,’ Charlie simply replied, his gaze scanning the group of walking cadavers dotted about the road in front of them.

  He couldn’t put his finger on it but something about what he was seeing itched at the back of his mind. Looking from one decaying corpse to the next he tried to pin down just what it was about the rain soaked scene before them wasn’t quite right, yet still it eluded him.

  They had only left Saint Xavier’s a little over half an hour ago and even in that short time they seem to have been dogged at every turn. Travelling on roads that had seen little movement on them during the last five years, apart from the footfall of the Dead or Zak’s men, they had been met with one annoying obstacle after another. If it wasn’t a crashed or stalled wreck restricting their passing, it was a storm felled branch that needed to be moved. If it wasn’t a large group of the Dead pressing against the sides of the cart as they slowly pushed their way through them, it was huge water filled potholes that belied just how deep they really were and threatened to damage a wheel as the cart suddenly lurched to one side. All these problems, that on foot were easily clambered over or walked around, had proven nigh on impossible for a bulky cart to manoeuvre past yet each time they had somehow managed it.

  ‘Just looks like every other drenched group of corpses to me,’ whispered Phil, unsure just what had spooked Charlie so.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlie mumbled under his breath, beginning to question his own instincts.

  ‘No need to look for more trouble where there isn’t any, Charlie-boy,’ Phil continued, giving Charlie’s shoulder a friendly pat.

  ‘I guess…’ Charlie began and then he noticed a figure sitting in a parked car, pathetically pawing at the window.

  ‘There!’ he said a little too loud, instantly regretting his volume as twenty set of cloudy Dead eyes slowly turned to locate the source of the sound.

  ‘Shit, Charlie! What the fuck!’ hissed Phil, shocked that the man so normally under control could make such a stupid mistake.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, I know,’ Charlie said in an urgent whisper, ‘but look…’

  ‘What? What is it?’ muttered Tom, squashing himself next to Phil’s bulky frame to look through the front viewing slit.

  ‘That Dead bloke in the car,’ Charlie replied, pointing to a battered vehicle.

  ‘What about him?’ asked Phil, not seeing what was so special about just one more corpse trapped in a car.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ whispered Charlie. ‘It’s the windows, they’re clean on the inside… well, clean-ish.’

  ‘So?’ said Tom.

  ‘So, there hasn’t been any traffic on this road for years…’ Charlie began, turning to look at his bemused travelling companions, ‘so if this bloke died in the car it should have happened years ago and if that’s the case…’

  ‘The windows would be filthy,’ Phil added, realising just where Charlie was going with his observation, ‘they’d be covered in smears of decaying mush… and flies.’

  ‘Exactly,’ whispered Charlie, briefly turning back to look at the rain dappled car. ‘Which means he’s hasn’t been in there for long… and as the Dead don’t shut themselves in cars… just who did?’

  ‘But why?’ muttered Tom, staring intently at the Dead man behind the glass, ‘I mean, what’s the point of going to the trouble of trapping one corpse when you leave the rest happily wondering about? Unless he’d turned unexpectedly and they bundled him in…’

  ‘I don’t…’ Charlie started to say when he stopped, leant as close to the viewing slit as he could and peered at the Dead man’s face through the rivulets of rain water running down the driver’s door window.

  ‘What?’ whispered Phil.

  ‘I… I think I’ve seen him
before,’ mumbled Charlie, trying to see past the distorted slack and pallid features of the Dead man to picture just how the face may have looked before death.

  It wasn’t until the Dead man shifted slightly in his seat that Charlie caught a glimpse of a green strip of fabric tied about the creature’s left arm. In that instant the face of a young man flashed into his mind, a young man who had once briefly looked at Charlie with nothing but gratitude and relief in his eyes, gratitude for saving his life.

  ‘Shit,’ hissed Charlie. ‘We’re going back!’

  For Charlie had recognised the Dead man trapped within the abandoned car, it was the young man who only yesterday had been fighting for his life alongside the teenage girl outside the gates. Apparently Charlie’s intervention had not spared the young man from Zak’s harsh punishment, merely delayed it. Zak had obviously been determined to see his sentence on the man brought to its desired conclusion and if that had been the case, this was murder; plain and simple.

  ‘What do you mean we’re going back?’ whispered Phil. ‘What about this plough thing we’re supposed to be getting?’

  ‘Screw that!’ Charlie replied, trying to gauge if there was enough room for Star to make a turn. ‘I remembered who that corpse is, it’s the bloke we saved from getting his arse eaten off yesterday.’

  ‘So Zak and his cronies got their way after all,’ growled Tom. ‘Those poor bastards were sentenced to death no matter what happened…’

  ‘Yep,’ Charlie continued, ‘clearly Zak’s been bullshitting us, right from the start. Killing this bloke aside, he clearly can’t be trusted and I’m not leaving the others in the hands of men I can’t trust, not even for a day. We’re going back and we’re all getting out of that place today…’

  ‘What about Carmella and the baby?’ asked Phil, knowing travelling among the Dead with a baby would be difficult at best, at worst it may prove fatal.

  ‘We’ll deal with it… somehow,’ Charlie replied, looking back at the two men. ‘Are… are you both with me on this?’

  For a brief moment there was silence in the cart while Tom and Phil contemplated what Charlie was proposing.