Five More Days With The Dead (Lanherne Chronicles Book 2) (21 page)

Standing in a defensive line behind the gathered oblivious Dead, the five other men waited for Phil’s signal. Phil pointed to Imran and Leon to begin. It made sense
that the archer and the knife thrower should take down as many as they could before the Dead became aware of their presence. Only then would the others join in with hand-to-hand combat. Imran’s initial arrow, blown off course by the wind, finally found purchase deep in the shoulder of a large Dead man. Luckily, with his heavier knives, Leon was having better luck. Already two corpses slumped lifelessly in the snow, a knife lodged deep in each of their skulls, as Leon reached for a third knife. Imran had better luck with his next shot. Aiming slightly higher than his target to compensate for the wind and falling snow, Imran let the arrow fly. With a thud, another unnatural existence ended, the large Dead man finally falling to ground to join his already felled companions. It was at that point that a Dead teenager, his mottled skin tinged green with a creeping mould, turned his head slightly and caught sight of the living behind him. With a low hungry moan, he reached a broken hand beseechingly towards them before stumbling away from the wall towards the flesh he so craved.

‘Now!’ Phil shouted, rushing
forward before any more of the Dead became aware of them.

Like a barbarian, Phil charged forward, smashing the skulls of two of the Dead with a double swing of his club, following the movement through with a hefty kick at the legs of a third. Even over the roaring wind, the buckling legs gave way with an audible snap of brittle
kneecaps. Turning, Phil then stamped down hard on the Dead woman at his feet, her skull cracking under his foot. With her head now horribly misshapen and putrid fluid oozing across her face, the Dead woman still tried to claw up along Phil’s leg. Knocking her back to the floor, Phil swiftly delivered a second stamp to her head. This time, her already weakened skull was no match for the force being applied to it and with a crunch, Phil’s boot sent her brain splashing across the trampled down snow. Without so much as a pause for breath, Phil turned his attention to another of the Dead reaching for him and began his onslaught again.

Gabe and J-man were working smoothly as a team, taking down the Dead quickly with minimal contact.
Despite his ankle, Gabe darted under outstretched arms, his pipe swinging, to smash at emaciated ankles and kneecaps left and right. With nothing to support them, the animated cadavers, toppled comically to the ground only to meet the full force of J-mans spiked club when they tried to right themselves.

Patrick, fighting alongside Phil, matched him in his the ferocity of his attack. To give himself room, Patrick kicked violently out at the chest what had once been a young black man, knocking him back against the Convent walls. His once rich ebony skin, now the pallid colour of death
, had been torn from much of his weathered body in strips. A few misshapen tattoos on what was left of his forearms still stood out in contrast against his ashen skin. With a powerful overhead swing, Patrick aimed to bring his length of pipe down on the man’s skull. However, at that moment, the Dead man jerked forward, causing Patrick to miss his killing mark completely. Instead, as the pipe connected with the Dead man’s head, it sloughed decaying skin and flesh from the cadavers face. Rancid tendons attaching the jaw to the skull tore free under this attack, leaving the Dead man’s lower jaw to hang uselessly to one side. Oblivious to the fact that he would never bite anything ever again, the Dead man continued to reach for Patrick desperate to fill his mouth with warm bloody flesh. Swearing at himself for his mistake, Patrick used the momentum of his failed swing to bring the pipe back up in a looping arc. This time the pipe smashed into the Dead man’s temple with a loud crack. For a spilt second, the Dead man was still. Then as he was shoved aside by one of his hungry brothers in death, his corpse crumpled to the ground, never to rise again.

One by
one, the animated bodies fell beneath their blows until the last, a withered thing that may have been an old woman in life, departed this earth with one of Leon’s knives lodged in the back of her head.

‘Shit, man,’
said J-man, leaning over to catch his breath, ‘must be getting old.’

Phil reached for the bell to alert those inside of their presence but before his hand could reach the cord, he could hear the cranking of the winch mechanism within.

‘Right, inside,’ Phil began, waving the men in as the gate began to open. ‘Duncan will bring our cart in. We check for any Dead hanging on underneath before the inner gate opens, then we repeat the process with the second cart. Gabe, go give Sarah the heads up, will you?’

With a nod, Gabe ran back outside to let Sarah know what was happening
. Phil turned to check out who was on watch duty. Whoever was working the winch was bundled up in multiple layers of coats and scarves, fighting to keep out the cold, so he was unable to tell whom it was. It wasn’t until the figure jogged back along the walkway to the second winch, that Phil recognised Bryon’s tell-tale limp.

‘Shit
,’ Phil said to himself.

Not only was it a bad sign that Bryon was on watch but in his urgency to get them inside he was already opening the inner gate without the normal checks being done first.

‘Imran,’ Phil called, ‘check the cart as Duncan rolls it in… I think the shit’s about to hit the fan.’

Leaving Imran to do the safety check, Phil pushed himself through the already opening inner gate to find a frail looking Sister Josephine there to meet him.

‘Oh, Phil, thank God!’ Sister Josephine wept as she threw herself into his arms. ‘They took them… they took them all!’

***

With little success, Liz tried again to find a comfortable position on Samson’s back. She had been riding for hours and the baby was letting her know of its discomfort with a series of sharp kicks.

‘Come on,’ she said quietly to her bump
, ‘give Mummy a break. I’m trying to get back your auntie Anne, okay?’

Reaching up
with one hand, she grabbed a low hanging tree branch and pulled another strip of cloth from her bag with the other. She had been repeating this at every road junction, leaving behind her a Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail for Imran and the others to follow.  The going would have been relatively easy, despite the discomfort, if it weren’t for the fact that at every turn, she was met by two or three of the Dead stumbling through the snowy hedgerows, attracted by the sound of the passing convoy. Each time she had to stop to deal with them, the convoy got further and further ahead of her, but she knew she couldn’t leave the Dead to follow on her tail. She would have to stop at some point to allow Samson to rest and certainly didn’t want a hoard of hungry Dead corpses coming up behind her while she waited for Imran to arrive. Best to deal with them when they were still in a manageable number, even if it did mean letting the convoy get further away from her. Luckily, the previous night’s snowfall allowed her to follow them at a distance, their tell-tale tyre tracks were clear to see.

Letting the branch go, the blue strip of cloth now fluttering in the wind, Liz looked up at the heavy clouds above her and wondered if she was in for another snowfall. Then, as if the universe had read her mind, she watched as the first flurry of dusty snowflakes spiralled down towards her. Behind
her, the scrap of fabric suddenly snapped loudly back and forth as the breeze increased in strength.

‘
Oh, great,’ she said to herself, as she gave Samson the nudge with her heel for him to move again.

Slowly, at first, these initial dancing flakes merely increased the speed of their merry pirouettes as they
fell, but before long, the lacy specks were replaced by larger heavier cousins, which barrelled their way through buffeting winds from the clouds above. As the falling snow developed into a full-blown blizzard, a bloom of panic began to grow within Liz. She knew if the convoy’s tracks were filled by the falling snow, the chance of losing them became almost a certainty. She needed to shorten the gap that had developed between her and the convoy if she was to stand a chance of staying on their tail. So with another kick of her heels, Samson broke into a canter. Pushing Samson to increase his speed on unknown roads like this was a fine line she dared to walk. Left with only her judgement and a fair amount of guesswork, she guided him around the worst of the potholes and prayed he didn’t lose his footing and throw her. She now raced past the Dead, shambling alone or in small groups, knowing she would just have to take the risk and leave them in her wake. Now was not the time to deal with them. With the weather against her, her time was running out.  

For an
hour, the snow fell and with each buffeting gale that swallowed her briefly in its freezing curtain of snow, she knew the chance of losing her sister increased.

‘Fuck!’ Liz swore to herself, as the road she was on abruptly bisected another.

Frantically looking back and forth along the cross road, Liz was at a loss as to which turning the convoy had taken. The falling snow had beaten her. She had lost them. She had let Anne and the others down and as the hopelessness of the situation settled like a weight in her chest, her tears fell unashamedly. Sitting back in her saddle, defeated, with her plumes of breath joining Samson’s in the cold air, she tilted her head, closed her eyes and cried to the heavens. For a briefest of moments, the heavens seemed to hear her. The wind ceased in its constant howling rage to allow the snow to fall silently about her, bathing the land of the Death with its purifying shroud of white.

‘I was afraid we’d lost you,
’ a man’s voice came, making her jump.

Liz snapped her head forwards, her hand automatically pulling free her sword from its sheath. There, standing a few meters in front of
Samson was one of the soldiers. Or rather it was ‘the’ soldier, the one Sister Josephine had told her about, the one that had seen her at the attic window, the one who was going to help her get Anne back.

‘Jesus
, you made me jump,’ she said, still a little wary of the stranger. ‘Where did you come from?’

‘We’ve made camp about three quarters of a mile down the right hand turning,’ he
began. ‘You’d better get out of this weather, because it’s not going to get any better and we’re not going anywhere until the morning now anyway. You’ve got to find somewhere secure for the night or you’ll freeze.’

‘Where’s my sister?’ Liz said, ignoring his show of concern.

‘She’s fine, believe me. They never hurt the children,’ he began, looking nervously back over his shoulder. ‘Look, I’ve got to go back before anyone notices.’

‘I thought you were going to help me? Don’t you think we need some sort of plan?’ she asked
. ‘There’ll be more of my friends following me, perhaps if we work together?’

‘Just be ready for m
e tomorrow,’ he replied, already backing away from her. ‘I’ll get as many out as I can, okay.’

The soldier then turned and began to jog down the lane away from her.

‘Be ready for me,’ he called, disappearing into the falling snow. ‘You’ll know when.’ 

A little stunned
that, the soldier should appear out of the blue just when she thought all hope was lost. Liz wiped away her tears with the back of her gloved hand, and took a breath to calm herself. He had been certainly right about one important thing, she needed to find somewhere safe to wait out the blizzard and soon. With a pull on Samson’s reins, Liz turned him around to return the way they had come. About five minutes earlier, she had sped past the dilapidated ruin of a cottage, set just off from the road and with the snow continuing to fall at such a steady pace, it looked like it was going to be her only option for a night’s shelter.

When she arrived back in front of the cottage, she could tell the fleeting glance she had received as she sped by had been somewhat misleading. The cottage itself was little more than a burnt out shell topped with the remnants of a caved in roof. The garage, attached to one side, seemed to be promising until Liz noticed the door was only loosely attached to its frame by a single hinge. This made the structure useless to her if the Dead decided to attack but it would certainly do as a make shift stable for Samson for the night. Liz was about to give up on the cottage completely when she noticed the bulky shape of a vehicle covered by a tarpaulin at the back of the garage. With a
‘grunt’ Liz swung her leg over Samson’s back and dropped slowly, if a little ungracefully, to the ground.

Clicking her blade free, Liz walked gingerly to the back of the garage, her senses on edge in case the building harboured any of the Dead. Grateful to find the only moving things in the garage were
she, Samson and the odd spider. Liz pulled back the mouldy tarpaulin to uncover the vehicle hidden beneath. Brightly painted faces of happy children and dancing cartoon ice-lollies suddenly stared back at her as the ice-cream van was revealed. Once someone’s livelihood, the van had seemingly sat untouched for the last eight years, waiting for its owner to return. With its windows high off the ground, it would certainly do for the night and Liz reached up to open the back door.

‘Please
,’ Liz said under her breath, as her hand hovered briefly over the latch.

Gripping the handle tightly, Liz slowly pulled down, praying it would open. With a satisfying ‘click’
, the lock released and the door swung open slightly. Knowing sometimes it wasn’t just shelter you found behind a locked door, she placed her feet apart in a defensive stance and held her blade high, as she reached forward with her free hand to slowly pull the door fully open. With a sigh of relief, Liz lowered her blade. It was empty. Just inside the door was a small concertina stepladder and pulling it into its down position, Liz climbed up into the van’s small galley. The inside of the van smelt of old dry mould and knowing better than to open the long forgotten freezers, Liz gave the overhead cupboards a quick once over before deciding, despite the smell, it would do for the night.