Six Days With the Dead (12 page)

Tugging at the thick protective canvas with her fingers, Liz mad
e sure Imran’s neck cover was lying flat. Once he had in turn checked hers, he gave her a brief kiss for luck and went back to checking his bow.

****

Delilah had made this journey may times. With her slow sure steps she pulled the cart, with little or no prompting from Charlie, around the various potholes pitting the long tree lined road leading from the Convent. As each of the travellers sat lost in their own thoughts of what was to come, Liz watched the changing scene given to her through the roof hatch. The high curving branches overhead encased the cart in a tunnel of softly moving leaves. Small sparrows, black birds and iridescent starlings, flitted from one side to the other catching any insects sent into the air by the passing cart. Liz liked to see these little lives carrying on, completely regardless of the fall of man. These busy little creatures had increased their number tenfold since the Dead rose. Mainly because the insects upon which they fed, in turn fed on the dead, which unfortunately were now in abundance.

After
about fifteen minutes Delilah came to a slow stop. She had reached the end of the road and needed instruction from Charlie on which way to turn. Ideally, as they were going to the village to see Jackson, they should go right but a large oak tree had fallen and blocked the road during a storm, forcing them now to make a detour to the left. The tree had been huge but week by week a few of them would come out to chop up the branches and trunk into more manageable sized pieces for their wood pile. This was not like working in the fields where, because they were quiet, they could work hours on end without attracting any attention. The very nature of this work was noisy and they were lucky to be able to work for half an hour before they attracted wild dogs or the Dead. Flicking the reins, Charlie urged Delilah to turn left. The detour would turn the forty-five minute journey to the village to a two hour trek. Delilah fell back into her steady rhythm, one step after another. She was in no hurry and would get her cargo where it wanted to go in her own time. Charlie preferred this slow pace. Go too fast and you missed that pothole or branch that hadn’t been there the last time and then you had a lame horse or worse to deal with. They couldn’t afford to lose Delilah, or a wheel, to simple impatience, so he always let Delilah determine the pace.

As Charlie concentrated moving Delilah to the left and right along the damaged road, Liz looked through one of the spyholes. Like most of the small roads they would be travelling
on, this one had high banks of overflowing hedgerow and bramble. Come autumn she would have to talk to Charlie about making a trip to collect the bountiful harvest of blackberries, rosehips, damson and elderflower berries that would be there for the picking. But these high banks could hold danger, just like everywhere else in this dead world. More than once she had seen one of the Dead appear out of nowhere, stumbling into the road from where it had stood hidden for who knows how long, drawn to the sounds of the living. Looking through the hole every dark patch of shadow or collection of branches, briefly became one of the Dead, until she looked closer. This often happened to people if they stayed within the safety of the Convent walls for a while, being beyond an immediate rescue the walls offered, they became a little over zealous. As they turned a corner Charlie suddenly pulled Delilah to a stop.

‘
Looks like we’ve got company,’ he said, indicating the rotting corpse dragging itself along the road in front of them.

The thing was in such a bad shape it was hard to tell whether it had once been a man or a woman. Thin lank hair hung in patches from the mottled grey skin stretched taut over its skull. Its cheekbones had broken through the p
apery skin on its gaunt face, bleached by the sun over time. With the lower half of its body gone, the Dead thing pulled itself along by its twisted and broken hands, trailing dried and withered entrails behind it. As it slowly moved forward reach by reach, its deep set eyes scanned side to side looking for signs of life. Forced to search continually for live flesh by a compulsion that defied the law of nature itself, the living corpse would drag its rotting body ceaselessly. With each painfully slow step of its journey, it let out a pitiful moan. A sound so full of desperation and hunger it filled Liz with both sympathy and horror.

‘
Do you want to get this one?’ Charlie asked.

‘
I’ll just check through the top hatch first, make sure there’s no other dangers around,’ Imran said, as he stood up to unlock the door in the ceiling. Flipping the hatch open Imran scanned the surrounding area for more of the Dead.

‘
All clear,’ he said and swiftly Liz jumped down from one of the side doors. Landing silently on the cracked road she drew her sword.

With a few whispering swipes of the blade she readied herself to end the Dead things torment. As she began to walk toward it, she froze mid step. A low growling sound suddenly came from her left
, deep in the foliage. A sound that indicated a danger worse than the decrepit corpse crawling in the road before them. She knew if a pack of wild dogs were around, this situation had just become a lot more precarious. Slowly turning her head to the patch of bushes the sound had come from, she backed up until she could feel the cart touching her shoulders. Delilah, also sensing the danger began snorting and stamping her front hooves in worry.

Knowing something was wrong, Imran said in low whisper
, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘
Dogs,’ she said.

W
ith that one word, the other two in the cart went on alert. If a pack attacked Delilah they may not be able to keep them off. Then the growling changed pitch from angry to a sound that indicated attack was imminent. Imran drew an arrow from his quiver and placed it in his bow. At that moment a large yellow shape broke cover from the bushes at high speed, barking wildly. Liz held her sword high, ready for attack. But the shape, which she could now see was a fast moving golden retriever darted past and on towards the corpse ahead of her. The large dog was old, obviously starving and its matted mangy fur was patchy and covered in dirt. The dog skidded to a stop in front of the Dead thing. As the dead hands reached for the animal, the dog pounced, its strong jaws clamping around the corpses neck. Liz watched as the dog worried the dead creature’s neck back and forth, until with an audible click its jaws came together. With the head coming free, it rolled along the road and into the overgrown shrubbery. Coming to a stop its eyes turned towards Liz, the living flesh it so hungered for. Showing no concern for the loss of its body, the head still moved its jaw in a macabre chewing motion. The now still torso fell lifelessly to the road while the dog transferred its grip to one of the arms. The dog turned so it now faced Liz and those in the cart. Emitting a low growl warning to keep away, it pulled the body back into the bushes from which it had come. To make sure the head wouldn’t become a nasty ankle high surprise for someone, Liz quickly ran to the where it had come to rest. With one sharp downward stab, she plunged her sword into the rotting skull, destroying the putrid brain within.

‘
What just happened there? Why didn’t it go for me or Delilah?’ Liz asked, as she climbed back in the cart.

‘
Well, the mutt looked quite old. Perhaps it could still remember the living as friend rather than food, who knows? Anyway, we were lucky that time. If it had been a pack we could’ve been in real trouble,’ Charlie said, as Delilah calmed down and began moving forward again.

Delilah pulled the cart through the small winding br
oken roads for the next hour, her living cargo sweated in the airless wooden box behind her. Soon they reached the first few of the abandoned cottages that signalled they had reached the village outskirts. Overgrown gardens, once cared for and picturesque, were now a riot of blooming colour. Huge rose bushes and flowering shrubbery growing unchecked, battled for space with weeds and wild flowers. Cracked garden paths, their disrupted stone work forced apart by tenacious roots, led to the sad and weather-beaten homes. Long since faded floral print curtains hung through broken windows, their tattered remains fluttering in the light breeze.

As the cart passed a small dilapidated cottage called
‘Morningside’, Liz could just see through the gap in the rose bushes that had once shaped an archway around the door. As with all the houses in the village, its front door was missing and nature, knowing no boundaries, had begun reclaiming the inside of the house too. As if to wipe the existence of Man from its memory, grasses and flowering weeds had seeded in the hall carpet, while ivy made its way inch by inch up the walls. In the shadows she could just about see the old dark brown stains that arched across the peeling wall paper. Someone had died here Liz thought, as she realised the marks were long dried blood stains. Someone had made a last stand here, fighting with neighbours or loved ones, turning this small idyllic home into a scene of carnage and horror. Delilah plodding onward left ‘Morningside’ behind only to pass the next house and the next, each had been a place where the living had fought the Dead, only for the Dead to ultimately win.

Liz clo
sed the cover back over the eye hole she had been looking through. The sight of the ruined little homes always made her think of the small house she had shared with Anne and her parents all those years ago. She clung onto every detail she could, the memories a tie to a better happier life. She could still see in her mind’s eye her mother’s collection of small figurines that had been lined up along the window ledge in the living room. The small shed that smelled of oil and wood, in which her father had stored his assortment of tools and bicycle parts. She could describe in detail the floral design on their kitchen tiles or the exact shade of blue of the hallway carpet. To forget seemed a betrayal of her mother’s sacrifice. So she would hold onto these glimpses of the past and would never let them go. Shaking herself from her thoughts she reopened the eye-hole. She needed to concentrate on what could be outside, not lose herself in the past. Delilah was just pulling them past the village pub. The Falcon Inn had clearly been where the surviving villages had tried to make a desperate last stand against the Dead. Some cars, now old and rusted, with weeds growing through the shattered windows, had been parked in a small semicircle to form a barricade around the front of the Inn. Tables and chairs had been piled against broken windows to hold out the Dead but to no avail.

Liz had seen this a thousand times. In desperation the survivors had unknowingly trapped themselves in with no means of escape. One by one they wou
ld have died in there, as dead hands pushed their way through reaching for them. Now, little more than a burnt out ruin, the Falcon Inn was a testament to the misplaced hope the living had in those first few weeks. Assuming they could just wait it out for an army or Government rescue that never came, many had shut themselves away in ludicrous bolt holes surrounded by the Dead, condemning themselves to a slow death or madness. As Delilah pulled them past the Inn, its scorched sign with a peeling painted falcon creaking in the slight breeze, Liz wondered if any other of the locals had survived the devastation. Apart from the Sisters and Crazy Jackson, everyone else had found the village of St Mawgan, and the Convent nearby purely by chance years later.

Albert
Jackson had been on a small trawler fishing off the coast when all hell broke loose on the mainland. Desperate to get back to his wife, Sarah, he took the small inflatable dingy with one other fisherman. Leaving his other workmates on the trawler, deciding their own fate, the two set off for land. Unprepared for the total carnage that awaited them when they finally reached shore, the two still managed to fight their way along the coast towards home. After four days of pure horror, they went their separate ways, each hopeful their own villages would have somehow been passed over by this wave of death. By the time Albert reached the quiet village of St Mawgan, death freely walked its streets wearing the faces of those who had once been his friends. As he smashed skull after skull of these slow walking dead, he painstakingly cleared the village of these abominations. He would dart from hiding places taking out a few at time, then run off, doubling back behind them to get a few more before escaping again. He set up base in the small primary school, its high iron railings keeping out any of the dead that wandered into the village. But realising that once they had seen him, the Dead would stand there reaching through the railings for ever, he decided he needed to adapt this new home. Going house to house he began removing doors and securing them to the railings. He transformed the school into a safe haven for himself beyond hungry Dead eyes. When the day came that he finally found his wife’s animated corpse stumbling down the road towards him, moaning with arms outstretched, he was unable to find within himself the strength to do this last deed for her. So weeping, he bound her arms and pulled her to the small Primary school, locking her in a store cupboard. Each day he would have one sided conversations with her through the small safety glass window set in the door. Giving himself over to this small insanity, he had kept his decaying wife this way ever since. When Charlie had found out about this he asked Jackson if he wanted him to put his wife to rest. But by then something had twisted in Jackson’s mind, no longer seeing his wife as the walking cadaver she was and he refused. After many arguments, Charlie had relented but insisted Albert give him the key to the cupboard door. If he was going to keep his dead wife, Charlie wanted to be sure she would never leave her small prison. Since then many at the Convent simply referred to Albert as Crazy Jackson. Albert knew they thought he was odd, staying in the school when there was a safer home for him at the Convent but he couldn’t leave Sarah here alone. He knew what he had done must seem deranged to them but he would rather have this last part of her with him than nothing at all. Apart from this one oddity Jackson was quite rational. He had dug up the playground and planted vegetables. He reared a small flock of chickens and was one of the few willing to go out into the countryside on foot foraging for food on his own.