‘Shit!’ she gasped, instantly knowing she had only one route of escape left open to her; the staircase.
Turning, she bolted up the steps two at a time, all the while hearing Parker’s stampeding footsteps along the corridor below her as he gave chase.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ she continued to mutter, almost throwing herself across the small landing where the staircase changed direction.
Ahead of her she saw a doorway. If she could just get through it unseen by Parker’s cadaver, Liz knew there was a slim chance that the Dead man would simply carry on up to the next floor. Admittedly the chance was slim but it was a chance she was willing to take. So, as she bounded up the last few steps she spared a quick glance over the bannister, just in time to see Parker’s ravenous corpse place its foot on the first of the stairs below her, Liz darted back to the door on the landing and as silently as she could, slipped through it.
Making sure the door made no noise as it closed behind her, Liz looked along the long and empty dim hallway with its own series of closed doors. Waiting briefly until she was sure the way ahead of her was clear, she broke into an urgent sprint. But running up the stairs must have tired her out more than she thought for she was only halfway along the hallway before she began to feel the uncomfortable beginnings of a stitch in her right side.
‘Fuck,’ she grumbled under her breath, trying to ignore the pain in her side so she could at least make it as far as the corner before she paused.
With the moaning of the Dead seemingly coming from every direction, Liz’s fear won out and despite the tight stabbing pain in her side with each step, she eventually reached the corner. Pausing only to suck in much needed oxygen, Liz stood slightly bent over with her arm against the wall for support. It was only when she looked up that she caught the briefest glimpse of the back of a woman stepping through an open doorway into one of the rooms. Even though she had only seen her for a split second, there was something familiar about her, something that itched at the back of mind.
Pushing herself away from the wall, Liz slowly edged along the hallway. Keeping her back to the wall and her blade held low, she soon reached the open doorway and cautiously stole a quick glance into the room.
Much of the room was bathed in deep shadow, save for a few beams of weak light breaking through chinks in the partly drawn curtains, but Liz could clearly see a figure seated at a wide desk, it was Zak. With his head tilted over the back of his chair exposing the pale skin of his throat, his lolling mouth open and his arms hanging limply at his sides, she could have been forgiven for mistaking him as one of the Dead but the open phial with its white crystalline powder spilling across the desk in front of him told another story. Whatever Kyle had concocted for this brother, Zak had wilfully given himself over to the blissful high it induced and in this high he had wrapped himself in a welcomed ignorance; ignorance of the death and destruction about him. Oblivious to the lives of those in his charge being stolen by grasping hands and bloody teeth, he was totally unaware of the Dead woman only now stepping from the shadows to look down upon him.
Instantly Liz covered her mouth to smother the choking sob that threatened to erupt from her. For as the woman she now knew to be Dead stepped through a dull beam of light, she saw to her dismay it was Carmella. Wearing only a long T-shirt drenched in blood and matted with gore, Carmella’s slack face had become little more than a smear of crimson. Her slow painful movements told Liz the poor woman had died sometime during the night but not only that, from her appearance it was clear she had since risen from her brief oblivion to feed upon the flesh of the living. With her eyes widening in horror and disbelief, Liz fought to make her limbs move. Zak may have been a willing puppet in the horrors his brother forced on those at Saint Xavier’s but he didn’t deserved to die, not like this. But even as she finally regained control of herself she realised it was too late. Already Carmella’s corpse was bending over Zak, her mouth opening wide to reveal blood covered teeth as she drew closer to his exposed neck and in that moment Liz knew there was no way she could prevent this inevitable horror taking place. So with a heavy heart she silently stepped past the open doorway, praying that whatever Zak had taken would keep him wrapped in its arms of blissful oblivion and prevent his return to the bloody and terrifying reality that awaited him.
As she made her way silently along the corridor, past a musty smelling study room, Liz wondered if Fran had found Carmella’s room empty upon her arrival or had the hungry cadaver been there, ready and waiting to taste her bloody flesh as she stepped through the door; and with these horrific images filling her mind, Liz made a decision. With Carmella and presumably her baby now joining Tyrone and his brother on the list of those taken from them by the Dead, their small group seemed to be getting smaller by the minute and with Cam and Michael still unaccounted for and with no idea where to start looking for them, just what did she hope to achieve by aimlessly wondering about like this? She had just made up her mind to take the next staircase she came across back down to the ground floor when she turned the corner and came face to face with Kyle.
***
‘Catch him!’
‘Yes, get the bad man, Daddy. Get him!’
The urgent voices of Tom’s family whispered at the back of his mind, demanding their retribution, demanding vengeance for their deaths. And when he heard their whispered pleas he would smile; for with their ghostly requests some tiny part of them was back with him once again.
‘Hurt him, hurt him like he hurt me, Daddy,’ he heard his eldest daughter plead, as he ran along a corridor in pursuit of the recently deceased man.
‘Don’t let the bad man get away, Daddy,’ came the voice of his youngest.
‘I’ll get him, Girls,’ he replied, hurtling round a corner, ‘Daddy will get him for you…’
Tom sprinted along a hallway already tarnished by the Dead. Even as he sped past with his sickles poised for attack, his eyes took in each detail showing testament that the Dead had been here; a splash of deep crimson, a smeared bloody hand print, a lump of something wet and indefinable, all told him the Dead had come this way; and then of course there was the smell. A mix of fresh blood, fear and shit it trailed behind the newly reanimated Dead man like a tell-tale cloud of death in his wake and Tom would follow it to its source and remove yet one more unnatural abomination from the world.
Ahead of him Tom suddenly heard the hysterical screams of the fleeing young man; his Dead pursuer had obviously caught up with him and was now claiming his prize of bloody flesh with gusto.
‘Catch him Tom, catch him for us!’ his wife whispered urgently in the back of his mind.
‘And kill him, Daddy!’ his two daughters begged with almost gleeful insistency. ‘Kill him.’
Charging around a corner Tom skidded to an abrupt halt; only a few metres ahead of him two men were on the floor, one living and one Dead. Sitting astride the young man’s back, the fresh cadaver had pinned his thrashing and screaming meal beneath him and struggle as he might the battle weary young man with the ginger hair simply no longer had the strength to shake off his hungry attacker. The Dead man’s bloody face suddenly darted forward, his mouth a gaping chasm of death, to rip free another strip of skin and muscle from across the man’s shoulder blades and as he pulled back, taking his mouthful of flesh with him, an arc of blood splashed up across the wall. With Tom’s gaze flicking from the splatter of freshly spilt blood to the slab of exposed and glistening bone, he felt his fists begin to tighten about the handles of his blades.
‘Kill him!’ his wife and children demanded in unison and with those words Tom leapt forward.
Even as he closed the gap between them, Tom’s arms automatically crossed; turning the two sickles into the deadly blades of a huge pair of scissors. Then with a roar tinged with anger, grief and rage, Tom uncrossed his arms. One second the Dead man was savouring the raw and bloody stolen flesh in his mouth and the next his head was tumbling to the floor. The now headless body swayed back and forth m
omentarily as if unsure what to do and then as true death claimed it, it flopped to one side.
‘Oh my God! Oh, my God!’ the young man panted, clawing himself from under the lifeless weight still on top of him and out across the bloody floor.
‘Finish him, Tom,’ came his wife’s ghostly voice. ‘He’s been bitten… you know what that means…’
‘Yes, finish him, Daddy,’ the voice of his eldest daughter urged. ‘You can’t let him come back…’
‘Oh, my God, please… please help me!’ The young man sobbed, cradling his left arm as he tried to sit up.
‘You have to,’ his wife demanded.
‘P… Please h… help me…’ he continued, his breath ragged as his body began to go into shock.
Stepping over to the terrified and bloody young man, Tom dropped to his knees and looked into a pair of wide eyes, dancing with fear.
‘Do it!’ his wife hissed from somewhere in the back of Tom’s head.
‘I’m… I’m sorry,’ Tom whispered, gently placing one of his sickles on the floor so he could reach out a comforting hand to the scared young man.
‘P… Please…’ the young man sobbed, knowing what time he had left would be filled with unimaginable pain as his body shut down piece by piece.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom repeated, shaking his head as he gave the young man’s head a fatherly stroke.
‘I don’t want to…’ the young man began but his words faulted with a gasp when Tom’s fist suddenly tightened about his hair.
‘It’s for the best,’ Tom whispered, slowly moving his other hand and the sickle it held to a position across his chest.
‘No, please…’ the young man wept, struggling pitifully in Tom’s firm grasp as his panic filled eyes flicked to the curved bloody blade.
‘It’s for the best, son,’ Tom replied. ‘It’s time…’
And with that, Tom’s arm flew out; the blade slicing through the young man’s throat with a backhanded swipe. Unlike the Dead man he had just beheaded, the young man’s heart was still frantically pumping and as the blade cut through the flesh of his throat, severing veins, arteries, muscle and tendon, his blood erupted in a fountain of crimson; splashing across Tom’s chest and face.
For a few seconds the young man pawed pathetically at Tom, his mouth opening and closing in shock, as his life-blood gushed out of him but with each second that passed he slipped further and further away from life and into a brief oblivion.
‘Now, Tom,’ Tom’s wife finally whispered. ‘Before he comes back…’
Nodding his agreement, Tom flipped the position of the sickle in his hand and swung the blade at the young man’s neck again. Whereas the first cut had been to prevent his prolonged suffering, this second swipe was to finish the job, permanently; and as the metal, already slick with blood, cut through the final remnants of flesh attaching the head to the body Tom wished the young man a speedy journey to his maker.
Sitting there drenched in blood, Tom lowered the young man’s severed head to the floor, pointedly ignoring the already film covered eyes that stared hungrily back at him and looked at the carnage lying about him.
Suddenly from back the way he had originally come, he heard the unmistakable calls of the Dead and with their desperate moans echoing along the hallways to greet him Tom knew his work here was not yet done. So, after reaching over to grasp the second sickle that now sat in a pool of cooling blood, Tom pushed himself up from his knees with a ‘grunt’.
‘They’re coming, Daddy,’ his youngest daughter whispered.
‘I know, sweetheart,’ he muttered back, simultaneously flicking both of his blades outwards to send twin arcs of blood dotting up the walls.
‘Tom!’ cried a woman’s voice.
‘Kill them Tom,’ his wife’s hissed. ‘Cut them to pieces…’
‘Yes, cut them, Daddy, cut them up,’ chanted his daughters in unison.
‘Tom!’ the woman cried again.
Then Tom felt the hand on his shoulder and he spun, his blades raised high, ready to strike.
‘No!’ Fran screamed, automatically throwing her arms up to protect herself.
‘Kill…’ his wife began to whisper.
‘Tom! It’s me,’ Fran shrieked, desperate to break through to the man lost to his mania. ‘It’s me…’
Confusion visibly flitted across Tom’s face as his mind fought to piece together what he was seeing but then, as if in a blink of an eye, reality claimed him and he could see the terror in Fran’s eyes.
‘Jesus, Fran… I…’ he began to apologise, slowly lowering his blades as the voices of his family returned to a distant background murmur.
‘There’s no time,’ she interrupted, just grateful the man was back in the here and now before any real damage had been done. ‘Come on, we’ve got to move…’
Glancing over his shoulder, Tom instantly knew what Fran meant. There, pushing past one another in their eagerness to reach the living flesh suddenly within their sights, was a horde of advancing cadavers.
‘Fuck!’ he gasped, realising if it hadn’t been for Fran he would have be torn to pieces.
‘We need to go… now!’ Fran repeated, pulling urgently on Tom’s arm.
With a nod, Tom turned and after stepping over the two decapitated bodies at his feet, began to run alongside Fran down the hallway.
‘Where’s Carmella and her baby?’ he panted, as he and Fran darted past a large empty classroom. ‘Sally said you’d gone to get her…’
‘She’s… she’s gone,’ she replied, barely breaking her stride while images of Carmella’s cold cadaver reaching out for her flashed into her mind, ‘the baby too…’
‘Shit,’ Tom cursed, shaking his head. ‘Poor little mite…’
Knowing she had enough horrific real memories of her own in her head as it was, Fran was determined not to conjure up imagined scenarios of little Vincenzo’s demise.
‘Yes,’ she simply replied, hoping they could leave talk of Carmella and her baby for when they didn’t have their own impending death barely a few metres behind them.
‘Which way now?’ Tom asked, skidding to a halt at an intersection where an old trophy cabinet proudly displayed dusty silver cups celebrating long forgotten victories.
‘Erm,’ said Fran, glancing left and right along two indistinguishable hallways. ‘I don’t know, I’ve got a bit turned around…’
‘Well we’d better make a decision and fast,’ said Tom, looking back the way they had come at the advancing Dead throng.
‘Crap!’ Fran spat, trying to visually place her position in the school to work out which way they should go.
Just then she caught movement along the hallway to her right.
‘Decision made,’ she suddenly said, grabbing Tom’s arm as she nodded to the bloody cadaver of a Dead man, shambling towards them as fast as his stiff lifeless limbs would carry him, ‘we’re going left.’
She was about to begin running again when she suddenly stopped.
‘Hang on a sec…’ she said, darting back to the display case.
‘What the fuck are you doing!’ called Tom, eyeing the man’s corpse that was closing the gap between them with each second that passed. ‘Come on…’
‘I need…’ she replied, pausing to take a step back before landing a hard kick at the cabinet doors, smashing the ancient glass front, ‘a weapon,’ she continued, reaching past the shattered glass to retrieve a black marble award carved into the shape of obelisk.
Testing the balance of her newly found stone club, Fran was pleased the way the reassuring weight felt in her hand and with a final glance at the Dead man, now only a few metres away, she darted back to Tom’s side.
‘Happy now?’ said Tom, nodding to the marble club the length of her forearm as they jogged along a dim corridor.
‘Much better,’ she replied with a smile, despite the ominous moaning of the Dead behind them seeming to grow as they continued their relentless pursuit. ‘I’m not one for playing the damsel
in distress; I like to be able to take care of myself.’
‘No shit,’ he grinned back, as they turned a corner and with that the smile instantly fell from his lips.
Purely by chance they had found the large hallway with the glass domed ceiling through which Kyle had originally led them yesterday. This in itself would have been a moment of relief for them both if it wasn’t for the fact that the space was now crammed with the Dead.
‘Fuck!’ Tom muttered, realising they were trapped; twenty pairs of Dead eyes slowly turning in their direction.
***
‘You!’ Kyle barked, his body shaking from the rage he barely contained. ‘What the fuck have you done?’
Liz looked at the man and knew of all the unholy creatures she had fought this day, perhaps he was the most dangerous. She could see his hate for her consuming him and even though she had the upper hand when it came to combat, Kyle’s rage made him unpredictable. Sparing a quick glance to the knife in his hand, his knuckles turning white with the force of his grip, she looked back into a face contorted and transformed with loathing.
‘Did you really think you could treat people like play things, Kyle, manipulating them to make this place into some sick utopia and not have it come back to bite you on the arse at some point?’ she asked, slowly moving her sword into a defensive position.
‘You stupid bitch!’ he snapped. ‘You have no idea what I did for these people, I kept them alive. I gave order to their lives when the world fell to shit. I… me… I put things right, I did what had to be done… They’d be out there like the rest of those rotting corpses if it wasn’t for me…’
Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead Page 31