Five More Days With The Dead (Lanherne Chronicles Book 2) (20 page)

In the time it took to retrieve the
weapon, two of the Dead had already fallen to Leon’s knives and he was smoothly pulling another two blades from their sheath covers. As J-man cautiously moved back to the edge of the cart’s roof, he noticed beneath the moans and sounds of Dead clambering hands on the side of the cart, the unmistakable low thud of sharp points rupturing skulls. As if to prove his assumption correct, an arrow suddenly appeared in the temple of a Dead woman below him. Instantly, her jaw went slack as her head was snapped to one side by the force of the impact. If it hadn’t been for the press of her Dead brethren about her, she surely would have slumped to the ground, her animated corpse once more claimed by death.

‘Right
,’ said J-man to himself, quickly picking a target from the Dead throng.

A bloated grey corpse, utterly sexless in its advanced decayed state, soon noticed the living fl
esh of J-man, hovering above it just beyond its grasp. Reaching up, arms sagging under the weight of its maggot-ridden skin, the creature fixed its gaze upon the flesh it knew would somehow quench this burning need that consumed it.

‘Not today, Fatso
,’ J-man said, ramming the club down forcefully onto the top of its hairless baldhead.

With a crack, the spikes ripped through the mottled skin, cracking the skull plates and rupturing the rancid cranial tissue. Grunting with effort, J-man yanked free his spiked club, pulling away shards of broken skull and brain matter in the process. Ignoring the fate of this creature, J-man swiftly moved his attention to the next cadaver, his club falling again to end an unnatural existence. One by
one, the Dead began to fall beneath an onslaught of blows from J-man’s club, Leon’s knives and Imran’s deadly flying arrows.

‘I’m out of knives!’ called Leon, five minutes later as he stepped away from the edge of the cart.

‘It’s alright, man, Imran’s just got the last two,’ J-man said, as the final animated corpses fell to the road, finally motionless forever.

‘Jesus, where did they all come from?’ Leon
asked, wiping his sweating forehead with the back of his sleeve. ‘God, I hope it’s clear from here on in. I’m knackered already.’

‘Beats me
,’ J-man replied, before jumping down from the roof to check on Shadow.

With the Dead now dealt with, Patrick clambered out of the cart, stepping over the rotting corpses surrounding them to join J-man by Shadow.

‘Is she alright?’ he asked, worried the mare might have received a serious cut from the glass.

‘Looks like just a scrape to me,’ J-man replied, gently examining the long but shallow wound on shadows flank
. ‘I think she was more spooked than anything. I’ll wash it out with some garlic water for now and get Gabe to see to her properly when we get to Lanherne.’

‘
Okay,’ said Patrick, with a nod, knowing the antiseptic qualities of the garlic water would help prevent any infection setting in.

‘Is everyone
okay?’ Phil called, jumping down from the back of the Lanherne cart and walking over to J-man and Patrick, as he pulled on a pair of work gloves plainly too small for his large hands.

‘Yep, I guess Jasmine was just the dinner gong they were waiting for,’ Patrick said, looking around at the collection of corpses littering the road while he gently patted Shadow’s neck, expelling the last of her jumpy nerves.

‘Well, we’d better shift these to the side of the road,’ Phil said, kicking the still form of a Dead man missing much of the flesh from one of his arms. ‘We’ll collect Imran’s arrows and Leon’s knives as we go. Do you have any gloves?’

‘Always come prepared,’ Patrick said with a smile, pulling a similar pair of gloves from his back pocket
. ‘Do you know how many arrows we’re looking for? Don’t want to leave any behind, because I know how long Imran takes to make them.’

‘Erm
,’ Phil began to say but was cut short by an urgent shout from J-man.

‘Phil! The hatch!’ he
cried, pointing frantically to the Lanherne cart.

Spinning to look behind him, Phil threw himself into action. There, having silently pulled itself up to the open
hatchway was the top half of a Dead child. The pitiful creature had lost its legs and much of the flesh from its pelvis, leaving a gaping hole through which rotting bone and organs trailed. Already its small Dead hands were reaching up to latch onto Duncan’s back, desperate to pull itself up to the flesh almost within reach.

‘Duncan!’ Phil shouted, still six strides away from being of any help.

At the sound of his name, Duncan turned just as the small blackened fingers grasped hold of his jacket, his movement inadvertently pulling the mutilated cadaver closer to him.

‘Jesus!’ Phil heard Duncan scream, as he fell backwards into the cart, trying to escape the Dead thing pulling itself up his body.

‘Move out of the way so I can’t get to it!’ Came Gabe’s shout over Chloe’s screams.

By the time Phil reached the cart, Duncan was on his
back, struggling to dislodge the snapping creature.

‘Oh
no, you don’t,’ Phil growled, grabbing what was left of the child’s pelvis.

With one mighty tug, Phil yanked the small decaying body from Duncan, swinging it over his shoulder in an arc and releasing it mid-air. With a crack, the child connected with the snowy road a few meters away. His breath pluming in the chilly morning air, Phil watched the bisected Dead child flip itself over and begin to pull itself along by its cracked and blackened claw like hands. As, hand over hand, the child pulled itself closer to Phil, determined to get to the flesh it craved, he could feel nothing but pity for the tragic thing before him. Phil walked forward to meet the Dead child halfway.

‘Sorry, little one,’ he said softly under his breath, and then with one stamp, he brought his boot firmly down on the child’s head, its skull breaking with an audible snap under the pressure of his weight.

‘Seventeen
,’ he said, turning back to Patrick after a brief pause, as if nothing had happened ‘Imran will need back seventeen arrows.’

‘Seventeen
,’ Patrick said with a smile. ‘Hear that, people, we need to find seventeen arrows and a dozen of Leon’s knives among this crap. The sooner we find them, the sooner we can get home.’

It wasn’t until he’d said it that Patrick realised he had already accepted what was left of the Substation group would be absorbed into the Lanherne community, permanently.
Together, they would become a newer and stronger group, pooling their skills and resources, benefiting all. These people, who before now had only met a handful of times over the last two years, had risked their lives coming to their rescue and he made a promise to himself that he would repay this debt to them, no matter how long he had to wait.

Twenty minutes
later, all but one of Leon’s knives had been found, Imran had retrieved his arsenal of arrows, barring two broken beyond repair and the bodies of the Dead had been hauled to the side of the road.

‘Patrick, Phil
, come look at this,’ Imran called as he stood by Delilah, keeping an eye out in case any more of Dead were headed their way.

Swinging the last of the Dead between them, Phil and Patrick let go on the count of three, sending the corpse of what had once been a nurse
, over the roadside hedge to join the pile of bodies already there.

‘What is it?’ Phil asked, hoping they weren’t about to be surrounded again.

‘Look at the snow,’ Imran indicated, pointing to the junction where the road they were currently on joined another that would lead through the village to the Convent. ‘Call me crazy but can you see tyre tracks?’

‘Shit!’ said Phil, jogging to the junction with Patrick close on his heels.

‘Not just any tyres,’ said Patrick, his head following the marks in the shallow snow, up and down the road, ‘but big ones, and from the looks of them, more than one vehicle too.’

‘This road leads right to Lanherne,’ Phil added, nervously scratching his beard
. ‘Can’t tell if they’re going to or coming from, but this spells trouble either way.’

‘Trouble?’ Patrick asked
, ‘Why? Perhaps it’s some sort of rescue.’

‘On the way to get you, we found Jackson’s Dead wife with a new looking
army knife rammed in her skull. I think it was just too much for the old man to cope with so he hung himself,’ Phil replied, turning to walk back to the carts. ‘I think we better get moving.’

Patrick agreed. It couldn’t be just a coincidence
that the electricity was suddenly surging, the evidence of petrol run vehicles and a new army knife, all turning up at the same time. Whatever was going on, they needed to find out before any more innocents died.

Despite their need to get home as soon as they could, progress was still painfully slow through the
snow-covered lanes. Phil had already made it clear they could break Charlie’s golden rule about dealing with any Dead they came across. They simply couldn’t afford to stop. The tracks indicated person or persons unknown had not only found the Convent but also been there, so they needed to assess and deal with the situation there before it was too late. As they travelled through the snowy village Phil prayed to God, whom he doubted was listening anymore, that nothing bad had happened to anyone at Lanherne while he was away. Already, the guilt was eating away at him, twisting his insides.

‘We should have gone straight back when we found the knife
,’ he said under his breath, guiding Delilah past the rusty snow covered wreck of a car. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid… all my fault’

‘Hey, we made that decision together, Phil,’ said Imran, placing a reassuring hand on the large man’s shoulder
. ‘It’s no-one’s fault. Let’s just see what’s happening before we beat ourselves up about it.’

Around them, the snow had started to fall again, lightly at first, a few dancing flurries momentarily swirling about Delilah’s head before being whisked away by the cold breeze.
However, by the time they passed through the village and reached the wide gate at the mouth of the lane, the weather had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. What had started as a few random wispy snowflakes had developed quickly into a thick heavy snowfall that covered their tracks in mere moments of their passing. Phil, struggling to see more than a metre in front of Delilah, knew he would have to rely on the mare’s instincts to get them up the lane and to the gates safely. She had made this trip countless times and knowing a warm stable was almost within her reach, she would not steer them wrong.

‘Lucky it’s just one long lane,’ Duncan said, looking through one of the
cart’s spy holes at the blizzard of snow being whipped about in the wind. ‘At least we won’t lose Patrick behind us.’

‘Can you see them behind us though?’ Phil asked, turning to look at Duncan
. ‘I don’t want them falling too far behind. Our tacks will fill up pretty quickly in this snow and Shadow doesn’t know this road like Delilah.’

‘Yep, they’re right on our tail,’ Gabe answered
. ‘I can just about see her through the snowfall. Patrick’s steering her to follow our route exactly.’

‘Good
,’ said Phil quietly to himself, as he peered through the front slit into the swirling snow outside.

Suddenly, through the falling curtain of snow, a large shadow began to emerge and take shape
. Fuzzy at first, any definition was lost among the twisting eddies of the falling snow, but then it slowly began to form. With each step, Delilah pulled them closer. The walls of Lanherne loomed larger, a signal their journey among the Dead was almost at an end. When Lanherne finally materialised completely before them, Phil swore at what he could see. There at the base of the high wall were at least twenty of the Dead, all pawing uselessly to get in.

‘Right, we’ll have to clear the Dead before they’ll open the gate
,’ Phil said, pulling Delilah to a stop just outside the gate. ‘Imran, can you fire accurately in this?’

‘My aim’s not going to be great but I’ll do my best
,’ he replied, already reaching for his quiver of arrows.

‘
Okay, Gabe, if your ankle’s not too bad, I’m going to need you to run back to Patrick and get Leon and J-man while they Dead still haven’t noticed us,’ Phil continued, turning to hand Delilah’s reins to Duncan.

‘Right
,’ Gabe replied, reaching past the sleeping sow to grab a length of heavy pipe hanging from the cart wall.

‘Be careful
,’ said Chloe, her words snatched away by the wind as Gabe quickly closed the hatch behind him.

Pulling a whining Toby up onto her lap, Chloe moved one of the spyhole covers
aside to make sure Gabe made it to the other cart safely. Absentmindedly, she stroked the anxious dog’s black floppy ears to calm her already thumping heartbeat while she watched Gabe hobbling his way through the blizzard back to Patrick. Thankfully, Patrick saw his approach and was already jumping down from the cart, with Leon and J-man close on his heels, their weapons ready for action. She watched as Gabe shouted something in Patrick’s ear, gesturing back to the wall to make his point clear. With a nod, Patrick said something briefly to Sarah and Helen in the cart before closing the hatches on them. The four men then braced themselves against the freezing wind to make their way to join Phil and Imran.