Lanherne Chronicles (Book 3): Last Days With The Dead

by Stephen Charlick

  As she spoke, all eyes drifted toward the young girl whose practical knowledge of living on the mainland infested with hungry corpses, might be the only thing that could save them.

  ‘Sir,’ said Andrews, handing Sergeant Ridge the soaking wet map that he had found floating among the debris in the carrier.

  Taking the map from Andrews, Sergeant Ridge forcibly tore his eyes away from Lucy and swiftly worked out the route they would need to take. While his fingers traced lines over the wet paper, Mallon darted back into the carrier to look for anything they could use as a weapon.

  ‘Here,’ he said, returning with a crowbar, a hammer, a spade, and heavy wrench he had found in the carrier’s tool box, ‘it’s not much, but with our bayonets, at least it gives us a fighting chance.’

  Slipping her assault rifle over her shoulder, Pelling took the crowbar and tested the weight of it in her hand.

  ‘Yeah, this’ll do,’ she said, swinging the crowbar left and right, ‘I can work with this.’

  Keeping the hammer for himself, Mallon offered Andrews his choice of the remaining implements.

  ‘Shit, this day gets better and better,’ mumbled Andrews, reluctantly reaching for the spade.

  ‘Go for the knees first,’ said Lucy, looking from the spade to Andrews as he swung it back and forth unenthusiastically, ‘once they’re down; use the blade edge of the spade to cut their heads off. Make sure you do it quickly though.’

  Andrews looked from his impromptu weapon to Lucy and back again, only now seeing the everyday object as the lifesaver it could be.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, swinging the spade this time with more conviction.

  Lucy simply nodded back and readjusted the sleeping child in her arms. As much as she hated these men, even in her traumatised state, she knew at the moment she relied on them for her very survival. She needed them alive and prepared to deal with what was to come if she and the child in her arms wanted to see another day.

  ‘Here.’ Said Mallon, holding out the heavy wrench to Sinclair who had joined them with a pale looking Grimes leaning on him for support. ‘It’s not much…’

  ‘Give it to Grimes, I’m sorted, thanks,’ the large man replied, pulling a large machete like blade from a sheath strapped to his thigh.

  ‘Here you go, Grimes.’ Mallon continued, offering him the wrench, ‘it’s your lucky day.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Grimes replied, weakly taking the weapon that would be the only thing between him and the hungry corpses.

  As he took the heavy wrench, the unexpected weight caused him to drop his arm to his side.

  ‘Back with us I see, Grimes,’ said Ridge, noticing how pale and weak the man still looked. ‘You’re just going to have to keep up.’

  ‘I understand, Sir.’ Grimes answered, pushing himself away from Sinclair’s supporting bulk.

  For a moment, he rocked slightly back and forth on his feet, desperately trying to shake the dizziness that still threatened to overwhelm him.

  ‘Right,’ said Sergeant Ridge, giving Grimes one final glance before dismissing him from his concern, ‘let’s get this show on the road. Pelling, Mallon, with me. Sinclair, keep an eye on the girl.’

  ‘Oh, and you’d better keep that brat quiet,’ he continued, turning to Lucy to point at the child with his knife. ‘I’m not getting killed because of your inbred kid.’

  Lucy pulled the baby closer to her and took an involuntary step away from the man. Of all of them, she hated this man the most. He had left her beaten family for dead and if he thought she would just let that pass, he was mistaken. With her mother now gone too, it was up to her to set things right. She would bide her time, and when the moment was right, she would make him pay. One way or another, Lucy promised herself, she would see him suffer for what he had done.

  ***

  ‘See, if you go this way the lane veers off and doubles back all the way to here. That’ll add another four hours travelling time, easy.’ Patrick said, leaning over Phil’s shoulder to trace a line on the map. ‘But if we go down this offshoot and then down here, there should be a way through to this Eden place, and then it’s only a mile or so to the coast.’

  ‘But that was barely an access track when the map was made,’ he replied, taking the map from Patrick for a closer look. ‘God only knows if it’s even passable after all these years.’

  ‘I think it’s a risk you may have to take,’ Karen added solemnly. ‘I don’t want to be the voice of doom, but realistically, we’re cutting it too finely to catch up with Sergeant Ridge as it is. If you want a chance of getting Charlie back when he’s still on the mainland, we can’t afford any detours that will cost us time.’

  Phil looked back at Karen and rubbed the back of his hand across his stubbly beard to help him think.

  Once the last of the pack had disappeared from sight, they had made it through the gate of the field intact and alive, and had found themselves on a small lane fenced in on both sides by high wild hedgerows. Vast towering swathes of Hawthorn, Blackthorn, and Blackberry, battled for space and light with the rambling bushes of Crab-apple and soft hued Field roses. While at their bases, yellow primrose, bluebells, and a multitude of flowering weeds and grasses spilled out to reclaim the weather worn road surface. So dense was the overgrown foliage that in many places it brushed against the sides of the cart as they passed, and with no way to go back, they knew they had committed themselves to following the overgrown lane, wherever it led them.

  ‘What do you think, Liz?’ he finally asked, his gaze finding his concern mirrored in her own eyes.

  Liz chewed nervously at her lip, looking from Karen and back to Phil as she tried to weigh up the risks involved in taking the access track to Eden.

  ‘I think,’ she finally said, ‘I think Karen’s right. We’ve got to stop them before they get on that boat. We can’t afford to waste any time.’

  With Liz making his mind up for him, Phil nodded in agreement.

  ‘Okay,’ he mumbled, flicking Delilah’s reins again, ‘let’s just pray to God that we can get through Eden somehow and back onto the road to Carlyon bay from there.’

  Within half an hour, they had arrived at the branch in the lane they had decided to take. A large oak tree planted hundreds of years ago at the edge of a field, now shrouded the junction with its vast green canopy. At its base, a tangle of thorny sharp brambles choked much of the lane.

  ‘One of you is going to have to get out,’ Phil said, turning back to his companions. ‘There’s not much space here, or light for that matter, and those thorns will likely cut the horses to ribbons if we just barge straight through. I need someone to lead Delilah through the gap on the side. The side of the cart should push them aside enough for Samson behind us to be fine.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Steve, moving to open one of the side hatches.

  ‘No, I’ll do it,’ interrupted Patrick. ‘No offense, but you haven’t had eight years to get used to dealing with horses.’

  ‘None taken,’ Steve replied, moving back to waving Patrick through the open hatch with a smile.

  Patrick jumped down onto a patch of bluebells, startling a small flock of chattering starlings in the hedgerow into flight. Briefly watching them take to the air in a flurry of iridescent black feathers, Patrick walked to the front of the cart.

  ‘Come on old girl, let’s get you round this corner,’ he said softly, patting Delilah’s neck.

  Hooking a finger through one of the rings of her bridal, Patrick began to guide her past the thorny bushes.

  Under the shadow of the oak’s large green canopy, small golden rays bled down to the lane below, dappling the cart’s passing in pools of golden light. Rustling in the undergrowth around him, told Patrick it was not only the starlings that had taken offense to his intrusion into their idyllic home. An angry looking squirrel darted across his path to bark its displeasure, before disappearing into the thorny brambles to scamper up the trunk of the oak. Patrick couldn’t help but smile at the small creatur
e’s tenacity. Delilah had almost cleared the bushes when the sound of more rustling and snapping of twigs caught Patrick’s attention. Expecting to see more of the squirrel’s furry friends, the smile slowly fell from his lips at the sight of the Dead thing on the ground pulling itself onto the path. To find this decaying abomination sullying a place of such life with its putrid stench and unnatural hunger, suddenly angered Patrick beyond reason. Giving Delilah’s muzzle a comforting stroke, Patrick walked over to the Dead thing. What sex it had been before snapping teeth had condemned it to this degraded existence, Patrick could not tell. Its mould covered limbs, riddled with burrowing larvae, frantically clawed at clumps of grass to pull itself further from the hedgerow, desperate to get to the living flesh suddenly within its reach. Patrick looked down at the creature now pawing impotently at his boot and hated it. Tugging his boot from the cadaver’s grasp, Patrick lifted his leg to stamp down on its skull. Following his movement, the Dead thing turned its rotten face up to look at him and as usual, nothing but an endless hunger burned within its film covered eyes. But as his boot fell to connect hard and fast with the creature’s skull, Patrick would have sworn the features on the Dead thing’s face had already gone slack, the unnatural animation fleeing its decaying muscles. Then with a wet crack, his boot shattered the putrid skull of the Dead thing, forever consigning its bones to be a blot on this picturesque corner of Cornwall.

  Wiping the putrid gore from his boot, Patrick looked quizzically back at the motionless corpse. It had happened so fast and with only the briefest snapshot of the Dead thing’s slackening face, Patrick knew he must have been mistaken, yet, still the image niggled and unsettled him.

  ‘Everything okay?’ asked Phil as Patrick climbed back into the cart.

  ‘Hmmm?’ asked Patrick, his thoughts still troubled by what he may have seen. ‘Sorry, yeah, yeah, everything’s fine, let’s get going.’

  ‘Right-oh,’ Phil replied with a nod, taking up Delilah’s reins once again.

  For twenty-five minutes, they travelled along the overgrown lane looking for the break that would hopefully take them to Eden. Thankfully, they didn’t come across any more of the Dead along the lane, in fact, the only other thing to cross their path was a healthy looking fox. For the length of a heartbeat, the sleek animal paused to watch them approach, mildly interested by the strange beasts that had wondered into its territory. Then after taking a sniff of their approaching scent, dismissed them and darted through the small break its daily run had created in the hedgerow.

  ‘We haven’t missed it, have we?’ asked Imran, moving forward to look over Phil’s shoulder. ‘Surely we should have found the side track by now?’

  ‘Hmm,’ grumbled Phil, his eyebrows creasing in concern, ‘perhaps these bloody hedgerows have closed the gap and we’ve already missed it?’

  ‘No, wait!’ Imran said, pointing to the left side of the lane some thirty metres along. ‘Look, look there. Isn’t that a gate under all that ivy?’

  Phil leant forward to get a better look and breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like they may have found their way through after all.

  After countless years exposed to the elements, the wooden gate was so rotten it almost crumbled under Steve’s touch when he tried to move it. In fact, had it not been for the years of ivy growth that, bit by bit, had developed a strangle hold on the wooden gate; Steve doubted there would still be any gate at all. So with only two hard kicks, the last remnants of the gate collapsed to the ground in a heap of damp wood fibre and tangled ivy. As the cart rolled through the gap in the towering hedgerows, they realised Phil had been right to describe this off shoot as little more than a track. Almost immediately, the relatively level surface of the lane was left behind them and the carts wheels began to crunch over the weed-choked gravel that someone had put down years before. Either side of them, the brambles and hawthorn bushes began to thin slightly, only to be replaced with light woodland. The trees here were perhaps twenty or thirty years old, and it was only when they took notice of the strangely even spacing between them that they realised this was in fact, man-made woodland.

  ‘It doesn’t look too deep,’ said Phil, guiding Delilah around a tall sapling that, like many other plants, had tried to take advantage of the break in the tree cover created by the gravel track. ‘Whoever designed this Eden place must have landscaped this woodland to create a visual break between them and the fields behind.’

  ‘Visual break,’ mocked Liz, shaking her head.

  ‘What?’ Phil said, looking over his shoulder, ‘I can read you know. Nadine’s not the only one that likes to lose herself in a book.’

  At the mention of Nadine’s name, the smile slowly fell from Liz’s face as image of her friend’s blood soaked body flashed before her eyes.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to...’ Phil began, realising what he had said as soon as the words left his lips.

  ‘No, no, it’s alright,’ she interrupted, waving away his concern, ‘Nadine was our friend and a part of all our lives for so long. We can’t just ‘not’ mention her, like she didn’t exist, we owe her more than that. We should remember and talk about her; I think she’d like that.’

  Phil gave Liz a sad smile and nodded.

  It only took them a few minutes before they broke free of the tree line on the opposite side of the young woodland, and as they left behind the mottled shadows of the trees, they found themselves on a sun-bathed break some five metres wide. It was covered in light coloured gravel and ran off in both directions, following the two-metre high metal perimeter fence.

  ‘Erm,’ said Phil, looking left and right at the gravel stretching off in both directions, ‘which way?’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Imran, reaching for a pair of battered binoculars hanging on a hook, ‘I’ll stand on the roof, maybe I’ll see something.’

  Within seconds, Imran had pulled himself up onto the cart’s roof and with the binoculars up to his face; he followed the curve of the perimeter fence searching for a gate.

  ‘Wow, they’re huge,’ he said to himself when he caught sight of the first of the vast bio-domes that made up the Eden project.

  Two huge adjoining domes, each having three or four smaller domes nestled at their base, dominated the landscape that had been given over to the Eden project. The domes were made up of a hexagonal pattern of strengthened plastic cells surrounded by a steel framework, and as Imran took in the amazing vista, sunlight glinted and danced across their honeycomb like structure. Even from a distance, Imran could see the area was awash with flowering plants and lush greenery. Not just in the gardens surrounding the domes, tourist centres and picnic areas, but the very domes themselves had been claimed by the plants they intended to display. Both inside and out, creepers of all kinds had worked their way up along the steel structure. It created a living green lacework that reached up for at least ten metres from the bases of the two larger domes, and almost covered the framework of the smaller connecting domes entirely.

  ‘Do you see anything?’ called Patrick from below him.

  ‘What? Sorry.’ he said, quickly refocusing on the job at hand.

  ‘Nothing to the left. The fence just runs all the way round unbroken,’ he finally answered, turning to check the other way. ‘And on the right, we have, wait, yes, yes, it looks like there’s a gate about five hundred metres or so down from us. It’s next to some sort of small building, probably a supply shed or something.’

  ‘So, ‘right’ it is then,’ said Phil, flicking Delilah’s reins.

  ‘Did you see any of the Dead?’ Karen asked, as Imran closed the top hatch behind him and the cart started with a lurch.

  ‘Not that I noticed immediately, but you can only see part of the complex from here,’ he replied, replacing the binoculars on their hook. ‘And anyway, outside of the domes and the visitor’s centre, Eden looks like it was designed to be a warren of pathways winding through various types of gardens. Of course, after all these years, those gardens have grown pretty wild.’ />
  ‘So, in other words, we don’t know,’ said Steve, taking a brief swig from a water bottle. ‘Great!’

  ‘Well, it’s not as if we’ll be hanging around to pick up souvenirs from the gift shop, Steve,’ said Liz.

  ‘Really? And I was hoping for an ‘I’ve been to Eden and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirt,’ Steve jokingly replied.

  ‘Gift shops aside, we might have a problem,’ added Patrick, taking the water bottle Steve was passing him. ‘If this place is the warren Imran says it is, unless a route to the exit is clearly marked, we’re going to have to find some sort of map to find our way out.’

  ‘Right, looks like somebody needs to get out with the bolt cutters,’ said Phil a few minutes later, as he pulled Delilah to a stop in front of the gate.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Patrick, pulling the large bolt cutters from a box under the bench, ‘Imran can you give me some cover, just in case.’

  ‘Sure,’ Imran replied, standing to open the roof hatch again.

  ‘Actually, now that we’ve stopped,’ began Liz, glancing down at her watch, ‘I think I’ll swop Samson and Delilah over. She could probably do with a rest by now.’

  ‘Good idea.’ said Patrick, opening one of the side hatches. ‘We don’t want to tire the old girl out.’

  So as Liz went to unhitch Delilah from the cart and replace her with Samson, Patrick went to work on the secured gate, both of them working with the secure knowledge that Imran had their backs covered.

  ‘Come on, you… fucker,’ growled Patrick, straining to bring the bolt cutter blades together.

  Suddenly, with a sharp ‘snap’, the blade edges connected, cutting through one of the links of the padlocked chain that had been wound securely through the steel gate. Holding onto the two ends so the padlock didn’t fall and alert something unseen waiting for him on the other side of the gate, Patrick began to pass the chain back and forth until, with the softest of ‘clinks’, it was finally free. Turning to see that Liz had already successfully swopped over the two horses, Patrick glanced up at Imran and nodded, ensuring he was ready for the gate to be opened. Imran returned the gesture and pulled the string of his bow taught, he was ready for anything should it be waiting for them on the other side of the steel gate.