‘Rod!’ came Fran’s frantic scream, instantly snapping Tom’s attention back to the nightmare pace of reality.
Kicking aside the corpse of a teenage boy, the fact that its lower jaw was completely missing rendering it quite impotent in its hunt for flesh, Tom sprinted round the corner of the building praying he wasn’t too late to come to Fran’s aid.
Ahead of him on the beach, a mere twenty metres past the open gate, and fighting calf-deep in lapping seawater was Fran. To his relief, he saw that she seemed to be holding her own against her three Dead attackers for now but her new companion from the roof however was another matter entirely. Flat on his back and thrashing about in the water, the man desperately fought to not only keep his head above water but also the snapping jaws of a large corpse on top of him from taking a bite out of his arms. If the man, who Tom assumed was called Rod, had only this one cadaver to deal with then he would have given him the benefit of at least a fighting chance of surviving the next few minutes but with a further six other hungry corpses shambling ever closer to him, his chances certainly looked slim.
‘Yaahhhh!’ Tom yelled, frantically waving his arms about as he ran forward, hoping to draw some of the approaching cadavers’ attention away from Rod and onto himself.
Fran heard Tom’s war cry and the unexpected wave of emotion that flooded through her threatened to erupt from her throat as a sob of exhaustive relief. To have come this far and to have the sanctuary they sought so close only to fall to the Dead now, seemed to Fran like some tasteless divine joke not only at their expense but with only one possible punchline to finish it off, namely, their deaths.
When she and Rod had darted past the Dead and made it through the open gate unnoticed, she dared to think that luck was going to be with them for change; but sadly fate had other ideas for them. It wasn’t until they had ran down onto the beach, their boots hammering against the wet cobbles of the causeway that things had quickly gone from bad to worse. First, Rod, hobbling as fast as his twisted ankle would allow, slipped slightly on a patch of wet seaweed and although he manage to stay upright and carried on running, the sudden jarring movement sent a fresh spasm of pain shooting up his leg, causing him to cry out. This in itself was dangerous enough when you were exposed among the Dead as they were, but the fact that almost half a dozen unseen copses had been scrabbling at the unchecked wall of the building, his cry had been more like a loud and an eagerly anticipated dinner gong.
Quicker than she thought possible the Dead were upon them and even as she fought to keep the grasping hands a bay, she saw more and more hungry corpses along the beach starting to turn in their direction, drawn by the excited moans of their ravenous comrades in death. At some point Rod had suddenly crashed to his knees, pulled down under the weight of a tall Dead man who had latched onto the back of his shoulders, the cadaver’s open mouth a wide chasm of broken blackened teeth about to bare down onto the flesh of his neck. Luckily thinking on his feet, or rather on his knees, Rod abruptly threw himself forward into the water, twisting in the cadaver’s grasp as he fell, briefly freeing himself and saving his life.
Tom cried in rage as he sprinted down the causeway and into the rising tide. Charging toward Fran and Rod, the cold seawater crashing up his legs with each step, he barely had time to think before his sickles struck decaying flesh once again. With almighty swipes of his blades, two Dead heads spun through the air, landing with a splash before disappearing under the churning water, their decapitated bodies swaying briefly before slumping to their knees and following them.
‘Come on, you fucking bastards!’ he yelled, roughly shoving a Dead woman’s corpse aside with his shoulder as he thundered past her before barrelling into a second, sending her flying into the shambling form of a Dead man, his torn naked back almost stripped of its skin.
‘Tom!’ cried, Fran, her fingers latched around the back of an emaciated Dead man’s neck, her fingers tearing through his rotting skin to grip tightly onto his vertebrae. ‘Help Rod, he’s drowning!’
Glancing in Rod’s direction, Tom saw what Fran meant. With the large Dead man still struggling to get living flesh between his teeth, Rod was forced to keep him at arm’s length and was continually being plunged beneath the churning water; his face only appearing above the waves long enough to gulp down air before disappearing again.
‘But are you?’ Tom began to ask, not wanting to trade the life of the young woman he thought of a friend for that of the stranger.
‘I’m… fine!’ she growled through her gritted teeth, the crunching and snapping of neck bones punctuating each word. ‘Just help him!’
Before he had even taken two wave crashing steps in Rod’s direction, Tom heard the body of the skeletally thin Dead man that Fran had been dealing with, fall from her grasp; his spinal cord now nothing more than a shredded mess.
For a brief moment Rod’s face suddenly appeared above the water, spluttering as he fought for air, his panic filled eyes locking with Tom’s.
‘Hold on!’ Tom shouted, as Rod disappeared beneath the waves again.
Closing the gap between them with a single stride, Tom slipped the sickle in his left hand back into the strapping on his back, stepped behind the thrashing corpse and deftly moved his now empty hand from the back of its skull over to its forehead, before forcing his fingers deep into the creature’s eye sockets.
‘Fuck!’ he yelled in disgust, feeling the film covered eyeballs popping under the pressure.
Although now totally blind the Dead man’s resolve to get to Rod hardly abated to any noticeable degree, but then Tom didn’t expect it to. What it did do was give him the leverage he needed.
‘You Dead… Fucker!’ snarled Tom, yanking the Dead man’s skull sharply back with a fierce tug.
Despite the sickening grinding of bone on bone, the Dead man’s neck refused to break, but that was of no matter, for already the sickle in Tom’s right hand was carving through the exposed flesh of his mouldy neck. His blade sliced cleanly through the Dead man’s oesophagus and trachea, it snapped taught leathery tendons and parted dark rotten flesh from bone until, thanks to the force of Tom’s pulling grip, the head was practically cut free. With only the spinal column and a spattering of muscle fibre still holding the head in place, Tom gave his hand a sharp twist and then at last the job was done.
Instantly Rod shot up from the water, coughing and spluttering for air.
‘Come on,’ said Tom, tossing the head nonchalantly away to give the man a hand, ‘you can breathe later, mate… we’ve got to go.’
‘Thanks, I…’ Rod began to say, using Tom’s grip to pull himself upright again.
‘No time!’ shouted, Fran, suddenly pushing the two men onward. ‘Move!’
If either of the two men had any hope that Fran was exaggerating their situation, the thought disappeared instantly when they glanced over her shoulder at the thirty to forty strong throng of hungry corpses crashing through the waves toward them.
‘Sh… shit!’ panted Rod, still leaning on Tom for support as he fought to pull in more much needed air.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Fran, almost pulling the two men with her. ‘Now, move!’
For a moment Tom seemed mesmerised by the wave of death that shambled awkwardly through the surf toward them, the voices of his lost family once again demanding further recompense for their bloody and untimely deaths. Noticing that he seemed frozen in place, his lips silently moving in conversation, Fran forcibly grabbed his chin to make him look at her, praying she could break through the deadly spell he was under.
‘Tom!’ she shouted, fearful he was losing himself again to the darkness that dwelled within him. ‘Tom, we’ve got to go! Now!’
Blinking, Tom fought to focus on the young woman in front of him, a strange mix of concern and fear on her face.
‘Tom!’ she repeated, her eyes flitting across his face looking for some sign of recognition.
With the Dead behind them getting ever closer, each second it took for To
m to break free of his internal dialogue seemed to be an aching eternity to Fran, but then something indefinable seemed to clear within his eyes and then instantly the man was once again with her.
‘Fran…’ he began to say, fearful confusion in his voice.
‘Later,’ she replied, urgently grabbing his arm to pull him forward.
In the few seconds she had been delayed with Tom, Rod had limped onward and even though he was barely three or four paces ahead of them, Fran noticed the water level had risen considerably. Moving up from his calves, the water now churned and splashed about his thighs and continued to rise with each step
‘Are we going to be able to get across?’ she called to Rod, now waist deep in seawater.
‘Tide’s coming in real quick,’ he replied, briefly looking back at her. ‘If we’re lucky we’ll be past the worst of it before it goes much higher… just take it easy though… and stay on the cobbles. From here on in the causeway’s raised up from the surrounding beach, you step off it and it’ll get a lot deeper real quick… Oh, and this area’s notorious for rip tides,’ he continued, almost as an afterthought. ‘You get caught in one and you’ll be dragged out to sea within minutes… it’s what helps keep the Dead off the island.’
‘Now he tells us!’ said Fran, glancing worryingly at Tom.
Whether strange weather patterns were to blame, or it was simply that Rod had been mistaken about the rising tide, Fran didn’t care but the waves now splashing almost half way up her torso certainly gave cause for concern and just as Rod had warned, she could feel the growing pull of fast moving water tugging at her body as it sped past, threatening, given the chance, to whisk her away to a watery, if temporary, grave. Looking back, she saw a few of the Dead had already fallen foul to these treacherous tidal currents, their decaying muscles simply no match against the powerful force of the fast flowing water. In fact even as she worryingly scanned the encroaching Dead horde behind them one of the shambling figures slipped from sight, dragged beneath the waves by an unseen current.
‘Rod, where…’ she began to ask just as her own foot missed the cobbled causeway beneath her, throwing her off balance and plunging her alarmingly under the dark rolling water with a splash.
Instantly her world became a smothering blackness of cold churning water claiming her body as its own and pulling it further under. She fought to regain her footing, kicking out her legs this way and that, but suddenly there was nothing below her but yet more emptiness. And then from the blackness she suddenly felt a hand latch onto the back of her jacket, pulling her backward. For a moment the terrifying image of Dead hands finding her amid the swirling gloom flashed through her panic stricken mind but then, almost as quickly as it had claimed her, the darkness parted and her head broke the surface of the waves.
‘I’ve got you, girl,’ said Tom, helping her fight against the current to regain her footing. ‘I’ve got you!’
‘Christ,’ she spluttered, spitting the salty water from her mouth as she steadied herself against him, ‘that was close… thanks.’
‘Run!’ cried Rod, the look in his eyes as he stared back at them, telling them all they needed to know.
Unable to help herself, Fran found her head turning, the compulsion to know her attackers overriding the all-consuming ball of panic blooming in her chest. What she saw made her breath catch in her throat and her fingers to curl in horror about Tom’s sturdy arm. Not only had the horde that Tom had originally led away from the beach returned, but drawn by the calls of the moaning cadavers, they had been joined by at least another thirty of the Dead residents of Marazion; all of them now ambling through the surf towards them. With the first wave of the hungry Dead barely ten metres behind them, Fran could take in every detail of the horrific visage of the closest corpses. Out in front, a good two strides ahead of his fellow Dead was an exceptionally tall and well-built corpse of a man. Dressed in what Fran thought may have once been camouflage army fatigues, the Dead man’s neck and chest was a blackened and shredded mess of ripped skin and muscle. But it was the look on his slack face that caught her attention. Even in his Dead state this man, who presumably had been a solider in life, clearly possessed a cold determination to reach her. With long purposeful but slow steps he advanced steadily through the water, the fast moving current having little effect on his sturdy frame. This was evidently a cadaver intent on feasting this day, and with Fran set in his milky sights a justifiable trickle of dread ran though her, forcing her shaking limbs into action.
‘Jesus!’ she gasped, her head spinning back around as her legs battled to increase the distance between the Dead soldier and herself.
‘Come on, move, move, move!’ she screamed to herself over and over again, her words almost becoming a mantra for her own immediate survival.
She was so intensely concentrating on simply putting one foot in front of the other that when the concrete harbour wall suddenly loomed, grey and imposing, to her left, it caught her quite by surprise.
‘Almost there!’ the words shouted in her mind as she fought against the imagined touch of Dead flesh upon her at any second. ‘I’m almost there!’
But cruel fate had not finished with the three survivors just yet and had decided not to relinquish her vindictive hold upon them quite so easily; she had one last trick still to play. So as Fran and Tom felt the level of the causeway begin to rise, their hopes of surviving rising with it, fate finally played her hand and they were met with the crushing sight of a high metal gate cutting them off from the island.
‘What?’ Fran began to say, unable to understand or accept what she was seeing.
‘Hey!’ shouted Rod, banging his fists frantically against the sheet metal, the echoes of his pounding sounding ominously like the tolling of a low funereal bell over the moans of the Dead. ‘Hey, is anyone there? It’s me, Rod, Rod Adams, open the gate you bastards! Open the fucking gate!’
Yet if anyone heard his cries they gave no indication of it and with the harbour wall rising high on one side and a sea wall on the other, there wasn’t even a way to tell if anyone was there at all.
‘They’ve… they’ve got to let us in!’ cried Fran, her fists joining Rod’s to hammer against the metal obstacle, fearful that barely a few metres away the Dead soldier leading his army of corpses steadily advanced on them.
Out the corner of her eye Fran saw Tom turn to face the oncoming Dead.
‘I’ll keep them off as long as I can,’ Tom growled to Fran and Rod, the waves crashing against him to send salty spray up his chest, ‘but we won’t have long.’
Both Rod and Fran knew unless someone opened the gate their choices were severely limited; be torn apart by the Dead or try and make a swim for it and as Rod had already warned them, if swimming was their only means of escaping death, it would likely be only a temporary one.
‘Get ready!’ said Tom, stepping forward to meet the Dead solider.
Sparing a glance over her shoulder at the man who was clearly putting himself in mortal danger to buy her a few precious seconds, Fran felt her fear and grief about to overwhelm her.
‘Please,’ she screamed, pounding her fists wildly against the gate. ‘Please…you’ve got to let us in. For fuck’s sake open the gate and let us in!’
Suddenly beyond the metal barrier, almost drowned out by the Dead and her own cries, she thought she heard something, something that perhaps promised hope, something that sounded like the sounds of a struggle followed by footsteps splashing though water.
‘Please, whoever’s there,’ she continued, glancing at Rod who had clearly heard someone on the other side of the gate too, ‘please, open the gate before it’s too late… please, for the love of God, open the fucking gate!’
‘No, don’t!’ came an unseen man’s voice calling out to someone. ‘Father Matthew gave strict orders…’
‘We can’t just let them die, Gregory,’ a second man replied, followed by the heavenly sound of chains clinking as they were moved aside, ‘this surely is not
part of God’s plan… Father Matthew would not want…’
‘Brother Mark, do not presume…’ the man called Gregory snarled in interruption, his words full of ominous warning.
But whatever warning the man called Gregory was about to offer, it fell on deaf ears for with a grunt of effort cutting off his words, the man called Mark, began to open the gate. It had barely moved a few centimetres before Rod forced his fingers though the growing gap to help pull the heavy metal barrier.
‘Fran!’ yelled Rod, straining with the effort. ‘We can’t open it for long, get ready. As soon as it’s wide enough to get through, we move.’
‘Tom!’ she cried, giving Rod a nod of understanding. ‘The gate!’
‘Bit… busy!’ he growled, struggling to keep his hands locked under the Dead soldier’s snapping chin.
‘Almost there!’ shouted Rod, the gap just becoming wide enough for a person to squeeze through. ‘Get ready!’
‘Tom!’ Fran repeated, noticing if he didn’t break contact with the soldier soon his hungry friends behind him would be joining him.
‘I know!’ Tom replied, his head snapping back to look at Fran, a desperate acceptance in his eyes.
In the moment that their eyes locked Fran knew what Tom was about to do. Despite only knowing her for a few weeks he was about to truly sacrifice himself to save her.
‘Oh no, you fucking don’t,’ she thought to herself, pushing herself away from Rod and the gate.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ shouted Rod, pushing himself through the gap.
Reaching out to make a grab for her, his fingers barely brushed against the back of her jacket before she was beyond his reach and, as far as Rod was concerned, beyond hope as well.
‘Not for me, old man!’ shouted Fran, a stern look on her face as she wading up beside Tom. ‘Just get ready to push him back, Okay!’
Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel Page 11