Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel

by Charlick, Stephen

  Together Tom and Fran pushed and pulled the gate open, all the while well-aware that with each second that passed the Dead and their own possible deaths drew closer.

  ‘That’s it!’ cried Fran, the bolt finally clicking home into its channel when the gate was fully open. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Of course Tom didn’t need to be told twice. Already his hands were reaching back to slip free the two curved blades positioned on his back from their harnesses. Darting back around the gate and barely a step behind Tom, Fran marvelled at the speed with which the man dispatched the Dead in his path. Limbs fell and heads rolled with each slash of his blades but if she was to think their escape was to be that easy she was about to be sorely disappointed. For even as Tom swiped at the arm of a male corpse dressed in the stinking remains of a once expensive business suit, a smaller female cadaver somehow managed to slip under the arc of his swing; her cannibalistic attention immediately fixing on Fran. Startled for but a second by the Dead woman’s sudden appearance, Fran went to take a small step back to give herself room to strike with her crowbar. Unfortunately the emaciated corpse of a six year old boy had doggedly made its way unnoticed around the side of the cart behind her and as she stepped back they collided; sending them both tumbling backwards onto the concrete slipway.

  Landing awkwardly on the Dead child’s legs and torso, Fran felt and heard the boy’s brittle bones sickeningly snapping beneath her weight. Yet she pushed aside her revulsion and any pity she may have felt, for she knew she could spare none on this creature. As sure as night followed day it would gladly bite, rip and tear into her, condemning her to follow it in its unending search for living flesh to feast upon. Determined to avoid this nightmare existence just yet, Fran spared a few precious seconds to use the end of the crowbar to stab fiercely at the struggling young boy’s cadaver but with the end of the metal bar only skidding across his shattered cheek bone to rupture his left eye, Fran knew she didn’t have time to grant him a final death, not before the short Dead woman was surely upon her. So with a yell of anger she slammed her clenched fist hard into his small chest; knocking him momentarily back down to ground.

  Briefly creating some much needed space between herself and the snapping Dead boy beneath her, Fran used the minuscule respite to push herself quickly to her feet. As it was, she only just managed to avoid the grasp of the lunging Dead woman, her blackened decaying fingers brushing sickeningly close to her face as Fran twisted to kick out at the woman’s corpse. The force of here blow was such that it sent the woman’s rotting shell effortlessly flying backwards into the open arms of her Dead comrades shuffling ever closer behind her.

  ‘Christ, Tom!’ Fran began to say, her head spinning as she sought the man who only moments ago had been but a few steps ahead of her.

  But in the couple of seconds that she had found herself fighting with the Dead, both Tom and the cart had already advanced well beyond her reach and even as she frantically looked for a way to close the gap between them, more of the hungry corpses slowly ambled into what little clear space remained; cutting her off completely.

  ‘Shit!’ she spat, knowing if she wanted to live she needed to get moving.

  Out the corner of her eye she noticed the Dead boy was slowly pushing himself back on his feet and with rest of the cadaverous crowd almost within striking distance, she knew her options were running out, fast.

  ‘You can do this, Frannie,’ came her father’s voice, so much like that of Tom’s wife only at the same time, quite different.

  For unlike with Tom, it wasn’t his voice that she heard but rather the ghost of a memory; a memory that had suddenly risen to the surface of her mind. He had spoken these very words to her many years before. Even now as her eyes flitted from one corpse to the next looking for a way out, she could almost feel her father’s comforting hand on her shoulder and the whisper of his breath at her ear.

  ‘You can do this, Frannie,’ he had said, encouraging his ten year old daughter as she nervously prepared herself for her first rounds in the National Junior Judo Championships.

  And in that instant as she remembered herself stepping gingerly from her father’s hold to take her place on the mats, Fran saw the slimmest opening between the approaching corpses suddenly open up.

  ‘Go, Frannie!’ her father’s distant cheer echoed from her past, spurring her into action.

  In a final moment of clarity before she moved, she noticed something on the far wall facing her, something she instantly knew had to be the point she was to aim towards if she wanted to survive the next few minutes. So with her head low, shoulders hunched, the crow bar held tightly against her chest and a prayer on her lips, she threw herself into the throng.

  With a ‘grunt’ she slammed her shoulder into the first corpse, knocking it aside. Just who or what it had been in life she didn’t notice or care, all that was important was that she get past it and that she keep moving. Fran knew if she was to pause for even a second, grasping hands would be on her, pulling her to rancid open mouths where only death awaited her. But Fran pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind, to acknowledge the madness of what she was doing would certainly be her downfall and as another ‘grunt’ escaped her, she pushed her way between two more of the Dead, shoving them roughly out of her way. Never daring to slow her pace, Fran darted under reaching arms, their skin mottled and filthy, knocked away grasping hands that tried to find purchase on her fleeing form and pushed aside corpse after corpse that blocked her path. Just when she thought the horde ahead of her was somehow never ending and that her luck was surely about to run out, there before her was the streaked wall, and more importantly, the thick electric cable hanging lose from the flat roof above her.

  As loathe as she was to intentionally make herself weapon-less, Fran knew she would need both hands if she was to climb. So after only the briefest indecision, she dropped the crowbar at her feet and went to grab hold of the ‘lifeline’ hanging before her. Praying her assumption that whoever had previously managed to get to the roof had also used the thick cable to help them, she reached up and wrapped her fingers about the cable just above her head height.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered under her breath, as she took a small jump to reach even higher up the cable before frantically beginning to climb.

  To her relief the cable held and what’s more, felt surprisingly sturdy in her hands as she made her way, fist over fist, up the side of the building. At any second she expected to feel the cloying touch of Dead flesh upon her, dragging her back down to their broken and gaping mouths but as her feet came level with a high-set windowsill, and still the Dead had not reached her, she dared to allow a kernel of hope to bloom; perhaps she may just make it after all. Yet no sooner had the thought flashed through her head than the first blackened claw latched, vice like, about her ankle.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, startled as the hand was suddenly joined by another and then another; each of them determined to claim her flesh as their own.

  With a fearful jolt, Fran felt herself about to be pulled back down to the Dead horde below her but she would not give in so easily to their demands and with a string of damning expletives raining down upon them, she kicked her legs back and forth, her screams a mix of anger and an all-encompassing fear. Bucking her legs wildly to shake them off, Fran could feel a few of the more emaciated Dead fumble and lose their weakened grip on her. Yet despite this, still more reached out beseechingly to her, desperate to pull her down into their deathly embrace.

  ‘Fuck!’ she cried, when her kicking left foot suddenly smashed through one of the small panes of glass in the window just beneath her.

  With the dire situation below her it seemed silly to still be fearful of cutting her leg on the broken glass of the window but the concern danced unnoticed at the back of her mind, unnoticed that was until, without meaning to, she stopped moving her leg. By some miracle not only was her left leg momentarily free of any grasping decaying hands but more importantly her boot had found un
expected purchase on the small metal frame that bisected the window. Unsure just how long the metal frame would take her weight, Fran used this brief respite to boost herself just that bit higher up the cable.

  ‘Yes!’ she almost sobbed, a wave of relief suddenly flooding through her as, with a final jerk of her right foot, the last of the putrid fingers slipped from her boot.

  Struggling to control the shaking muscles in her arms, Fran knew the sanctuary that the roof offered lay less than a metre above her yet even as her aching fingers finally curled over the lip of the clogged guttering she feared she simply didn’t have the strength to carry on. For as agile and as skilled as she was at defending herself, poor diet and simply not enough calories to fuel any prolonged exercise left her feeling worryingly weak.

  ‘Come on!’ she spat, determination giving her the strength she needed to at last pull her right elbow up onto the guttering just before reaching over the raised lip running the perimeter of the roof.

  Feeling the rough brickwork slipping beneath her sore fingers, Fran blindly moved her hand back and forth, desperate to find something else to grab hold of for leverage, while below her the Dead, sensing the imminent escape of their meal, slapped frantically at the wall; their chilling moans and grunts calling up to her to in savage urgency.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she panted, knowing her protesting muscles could only hold on for so much longer.

  Fearful she would lose her grip and fall at any moment, Fran realised she may have to relinquish her ever weakening one handed grip of the cable, make a desperate grab over the low roof perimeter wall to join her other arm and from there simply hope she had enough strength to kick one of her legs high enough to hook a foot over. She was just building up the courage to commit herself to such a risky move when two hands, dark with clotted and dried blood, suddenly latched onto her wrists.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, a wild panic instantly threatening to overwhelm her as she instinctively struggled to free herself from their grasp.

  ‘Stop struggling or I’m going to drop you!’ growled a man’s strained voice from somewhere above her.

  It was then that Fran noticed the fierce grip that held her in place was not one of cold rotting flesh but warm, living and lifesaving. With her cheeks flushing in embarrassment for her screams, she realised it was of course the survivor of a previous attack whose own escape to the roof she had followed and not one of the Dead after all.

  ‘Can you swing one of your legs up?’ came the man’s voice again from the other side of the low wall. ‘I… I don’t think I can pull you all the way up on my own.’

  ‘I… I’ll try,’ Fran replied, kicking up her right leg while her unseen rescuer pulled on her wrists.

  On her first attempt the toe of her boot scraped tantalizingly close to the edge of the roof but as gravity and her own fatigue fought against her, her foot slipped back down.

  ‘Come on… you can do it,’ the man encouraged, his words somewhat belittled by his gruff and almost irritated tone.

  ‘Okay… ready?’ she warned, worried that the longer she literally placed her life in the hands of this stranger the more likely he was to drop her. ‘Here goes!’

  This time as her leg swung to the side the hands about her wrists pulled with a new determination and despite the burning muscles in her thighs, Fran found the instep of her right boot had become temporarily lodged over the lip of the roof, giving her just the leverage she needed.

  ‘Come on!’ the man yelled again, suddenly reaching forward to grab a fistful of the back of Fran’s jacket to yank her forward. ‘Shift yourself!’

  ‘Christ!’ Fran grunted, scrabbling to pull herself over the wall while the man’s hands indelicately seemed to grab anything and everything in his attempt to pull her up.

  Finally with one last cry of exhaustive effort from both of them, Fran at last tumbled over the low wall, only to find herself collapsed on top of the panting man in a tangle of weary limbs.

  For almost a minute the two of them simply lay there without bothering to free themselves, each gulping down air to feed their oxygen-starved muscles. But the moment of relief soon turned to something else, making it seem awkward for them both to still be lying on top of each other, so without speaking they uncomfortably separated themselves. Fran was about to speak when the man abruptly broke out in a deeply chesty and painful sounding cough. Once his coughing had eventually subsided, he spat the resulting thick phlegm over the edge of the roof to the Dead horde below and then turned to look quizzically at Fran.

  ‘So,’ he began, moving to wipe a dribble of spit from his lips with the back of his hand before remembering it was covered in dried blood and stopping himself. ‘Just who the hell are you and why the fuck would you be so stupid as to get out of your cart like that?’

  ‘Fran,’ she replied, noticing the thick cord she had climbed up led to a large overturned but heavy looking satellite dish taking up almost half of the space on the roof. ‘My name’s Fran and we needed to open the gate to get to the island… we…we didn’t have much choice.’

  The man let forth a short bark of laughter and Fran found herself wondering just who or what type of man she had effectively marooned herself with on this island amid a sea of the Dead. Looking at him, Fran had no doubt she could take him in a fight if she needed to. They may have been relatively similar in height and build but with her father’s training she knew she had the edge, an edge she knew to keep under wraps until she needed it; after all there was no point in giving away all of the cards you held until strictly necessary.

  The man watched her watching him, his dark eyes looking out at her from beneath a set of thick bushy eyebrows, almost as if he too was only just realising he was trapped with a stranger and then despite the gruesome grime covering his hands, he scratched thoughtfully at his equally bushy goatee beard and the heavy stubble growing across his somewhat gaunt cheek.

  ‘That fella you were with…’ he began, slowly pushing himself to his feet and limping around the satellite dish to look out over at the beach and the causeway beyond, ‘is he fucking mental or what? I saw the way he fought,’ he continued, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun with a blood caked hand. ‘Crazy, fucking crazy!’

  ‘Who isn’t these day?’ said Fran, stepping gingerly across the roof to follow him to the edge.

  ‘Touché’ he said, glancing briefly back at her, an amused twinkle in his eye.

  ‘So what happened here…erm…’ she continued, pausing for him to offer up his name.

  ‘Roderick, Roderick Adams…’ he replied, turning, his hand extended for her to shake, which considering their previous compromising position seemed slightly amusing to Fran. ‘Just call me Rod though.’

  ‘Please to meet you, Rod… and thanks for the hand up,’ she smiled, idly noticing the cracking and flaking of the dried blood on his hand as she shook it. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The usual,’ he began, the amused twinkle replace with something dark and brooding as he slowly released her hand, ‘someone got sloppy, good people died and the Dead got fed.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Fran, instinctively saying the word had become little more than a pointless ritual. ‘Did you lose many? We saw the…’

  She only just stopped herself before she mentioned the pool of congealing blood and gore they had seen, knowing it had inevitably been someone Rod had known.

  ‘The blood,’ he completed for her, his clenching fists causing a shower of powdery dried blood to fall from his hands. ‘No, not many…. Not that there’s enough of us left these days that we can afford to lose any.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I…’ Fran tried to interrupt, the words seeming to mean more to her now she saw the anger and pain in Rod’s face.

  ‘And those bastards just left us,’ he continued, ignoring Fran for the moment to look back out across the beach. ‘Saved their own arses and left us to the Dead… the Fuckers!’

  ‘Oh, so you’re from the island?’ she asked, realising that was
where he was looking.

  ‘St Michael’s mount? Aye,’ he replied, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching angrily. ‘I’ve been there with my family since the beginning of all this.’

  ‘Your family?’ Fran prompted.

  ‘Yeah, my wife, Emily and my boy, Graham,’ he replied, turning to look back at her, his anger replaced with what Fran could only describe as intense worry.

  ‘But they’re safe,’ she offered, hoping her words of comfort would make him feel better. ‘They’re on the island, away from all this… your family, they’re safe.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ he mumbled disconcertingly, his gaze returning to the castle topped St Michael’s mount, looming off shore.

  ‘The Dead, they… they haven’t got to the island have they?’ she started to ask, a small kernel of concern starting to grow within her.

  ‘It’s not…’ Rod started to reply, his words suddenly interrupted by Tom’s booming voice shouting out Fran’s name.

  ‘What the?’ she mumbled, running over to a corner of the roof, Rod limping slowly behind her.

  Scanning frantically across the Dead spotted beach below her, it didn’t take Fran long to locate him. Drenched in dark blood, his face spotted with unimaginable rotting gore, Tom stood atop the rusting wreck of small boat that was half submerged in the sand, waving up at her with his sickles.

  ‘I’m going to draw a bunch of them off!’ he cried, glancing quickly down at the Dead, their decaying limbs already reaching up at him. ‘Follow the cart along the causeway!’

  ‘What does he mean he’s going to draw them off?’ asked Rod, looking quizzically from Fran to the crazy man who looked like he just escaped from a hellish abattoir.

  ‘I don’t…’ Fran began to reply just as Tom let out a gleeful ‘whoop’ and threw himself from his perch, suddenly disappearing from sight.

  ‘Tom!’ she screamed, fearful her friend’s tenuous hold on his sanity had finally slipped.