Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

‘I’m going to draw a bunch of them off!’ he cried, glancing quickly down at the Dead, their decaying limbs already reaching up at him. ‘Follow the cart along the causeway!’

‘What does he mean he’s going to draw them off?’ asked Rod, looking quizzically from Fran to the crazy man who looked like he just escaped from a hellish abattoir.

‘I don’t…’ Fran began to reply just as Tom let out a gleeful ‘whoop’ and threw himself from his perch, suddenly disappearing from sight.

‘Tom!’ she screamed, fearful her friend’s tenuous hold on his sanity had finally slipped.

But Fran needn’t have worried, for before the Dead had even had time to react to the living man so fortunately appearing among them, Tom was up and running; a littering of severed limbs left in his wake.

‘Come on, you Dead bastards!’ he yelled, twisting as he ran to encourage the hungry corpses to follow.

Sure enough, one by one the cadavers pushed themselves away from the shattered hull of the boat while behind them their decaying brothers and sisters forced one stumbling foot in front of another as they made their way through the open gate and down onto the beach causeway to join them.

‘We need to move,’ whispered Fran, stepping slowly away from the roof’s edge. ‘He needs to be their only focus if we want any chance of clearing any of the Dead below us.’

Still a little confused, Rod gave Tom one last bemused look before following Fran back to the toppled over satellite dish to sit down.

‘So, how long do we wait?’ he asked, grunting slightly as he lowered himself down.

‘Are you going to be able to run?’ she asked, more concerned with his limp than his question.

‘You’d be surprised how effective having twenty hungry corpses coming after you makes you forget a twisted ankle,’ he replied with a throaty chuckle that threatened to turn into another coughing fit while he subconsciously reached down to rub his left leg. ‘How’d you think I got up here in the first place?’

‘Point taken,’ she nodded, realising she had gotten too used to looking out for Kai and had mistakenly assumed Rod was equally ill-equipped to look after himself. ‘Sorry.’

Waving away her apology as unnecessary, Rod glanced at the dial of the blood smeared watch on his wrist.

‘We’re cutting it a bit fine though,’ he muttered, using his thumb to brush some of the flaking blood off of the cracked glass cover. ‘Tide’s coming in pretty fast,’ he continued. ‘Won’t be long before most of the causeway’s three metres under water.’ 

Chewing nervously on her lip, Fran looked back out at the white topped waves, their spray crashing wildly almost all of the way round the base of the island.

‘How long have we got?’ she asked, realising Tom’s shouts and rousing calls had faded slightly while he led his excited Dead groupies presumably further down the beach.

Looking from his watch back at the causeway, Rod narrowed his eyes in concentration. Forty-five years of living and working in Marazion gave him the knowledge he needed to give Fran a reliably accurate answer, even if it wasn’t the one she wanted to hear.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ he finally replied, scratching at the stubble under his chin. ‘Twenty-five, tops.’

‘Crap!’ she said, pushing herself back up onto her knees. ‘That doesn’t give Tom long… or us.’

***

Tom span, kicking out at the legs of a Dead man, its chest a mass of maggot-ridden flesh.

‘Too slow!’ laughed Tom, a dark hysteria dancing menacingly along the edge of his self-control as he slashed down at the Dead man’s neck.

Almost as if welcoming his attack, the rotting flesh parted, giving way to the metal of Tom’s blade as it sliced through it.

‘I can’t!’ Tom hissed, almost irritated as he tried to placate the goading voices in his head.

‘Not now,’ he continued, darting under the lunging outstretched arms of the Dead horde around him. ‘Later, I promise…’

It had seemed like such a simple plan when he first jumped from his perch on the wrecked boat; become the Pied Piper, lead the Dead away, give Fran a chance to get to the causeway so she could follow Kai and the cart over to the island and then somehow double back himself or skirt round the decaying crowd so he could follow close on her heels. But now as he tried to make his way along the beach, the ravenous throng seemingly forever closing in on him, Tom had the niggling suspicion that he may just have made a terrible and possibly fatal mistake.

‘Oh, cut this one, Daddy. Cut him!’ giggled his youngest daughter when the corpse of a young man dressed in filthy tattered pyjama bottoms stumbled directly in front of him.

‘Yes, take his head off, Daddy,’ his other daughter demanded.

‘Kill him, Tom,’ his wife added, her voice joining the ghostly chorus of pleas from his daughters. ‘Kill him for us.’

‘Please!’ Tom desperately begged, knocking aside the corpse of a short woman as she made a grab for his shoulder. ‘Please, not now, I…’

But his deceased family would not be silenced.

‘We don’t want your excuses!’ his wife interrupted.

‘They hurt me, Daddy,’ his youngest daughter added, her voice tearing at his heart. ‘They hurt me so much.’

With a snapshot of her smiling face flashing through his mind, the sickle in his right hand flashed out before him, almost as if by its own accord, and raked across the Dead young man’s exposed and emaciated chest. Screaming with anguish and frustration, Tom struck out again and again, his movements savage yet instinctive. The young man’s corpse soon fell, swiftly followed by another and then another; their bodies quickly reduced to mounds of lifeless flesh while their forever hungry eyes roamed beseechingly in decapitated heads. Tom lost himself to the darkness of his grief, he gave himself over to his pain and relinquished his actions to the retribution his family demanded. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the steep slope of boulders that led back up to the promenade appeared before him; and with a grin spreading across his gore covered face, Tom knew the Dead would not beat him, not yet, not this time.   

***

As the minutes ticked by, Fran and Rod couldn’t help but watch the lapping waves creeping their way up the shore, reclaiming the causeway one cobblestone at a time while Tom’s calls and cries faded more and more into the distance.

‘How long has it been now?’ asked Fran, tilting Rod’s wrist towards her to see his watch.

Below them a few of the Dead still pawed stubbornly at the walls, undeterred and un-enticed by Tom’s display; the image of Fran evading their clutches somehow lingering in the dark recesses of their decaying minds.

‘Long enough,’ Rod finally replied, wincing slightly as he pushed himself up from his perch on the satellite dish. ‘If we want to get across tonight, we’d better make our move now.’

‘But we’ve still got company,’ said Fran, nodding to the four hungry corpses below them. ‘I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy trying to climb down without giving the welcome committee something to chew on.’

‘Hmm,’ Rod mused, once again scratching at the stubble under his chin.

‘Got it!’ he finally said, a triumphant glint in his eye.

Limping over to the edge of the roof, Rod took hold of the thick cable and began to pull it up.

‘Check the front,’ he said, coiling the cable back and forth in his hands as he gestured to one of the other low walls. ‘The Dead saw both of us come up this side, so chances are it’ll likely be free now that your mate has led most of them off.’

‘What about the back of the building?’ asked Fran, walking to look down at the front of the Harbour Master’s building. ‘Wouldn’t that be better? I mean, we’d be lowering ourselves directly down onto the beach.’

‘No good,’ Rod replied, shaking his head just as the end of the cable rose above the roof’s low surrounding wall. ‘There’s a bigger drop that side, the cable won’t be long enough… and anyway, truth be told, I doubt I could cope with landing badly on this ankle again.’

‘Oh,’ said Fran, wondering for the second time if it came to it would Rod be able to outrun the Dead and if not was she willing to risk her own life to effectively carry him.

‘It’s just the drop I’m worried about,’ he added, noticing the way her eyes discreetly flicked to his injured ankle. ‘I told you. If I’ve got to move, I’ll move, okay?’

‘Okay. If you say so,’ she replied, hoping he was more convinced of his words than she was.

Despite Rod’s desperation to get off the roof and back to his family, she could tell he was a proud man and wouldn’t want her to think him as weak. But she just hoped this pride wouldn’t come before the proverbial ‘fall’, for she knew when you were running for your life, situations could change within seconds and with the Dead on your heels these were seconds you simply couldn’t spare.

‘So, is it clear?’ he asked again, dragging the looped cable after him.

Shaking the mages of Rod falling beneath a wave of grasping Dead hands from her mind, Fran gingerly peered down to the front of the building.

‘All clear,’ she whispered back, giving him the ‘thumbs up’.

With a ‘grunt’ Rod tossed the cable over the roof’s edge, the sound of it slapping against the filthy brickwork and smeared windows barely audible over the cries of the four corpses still just around the corner from them.

‘I’d better go first,’ said Fran, looking from the pavement below, back to Rod. ‘Just in case.’

‘Sure… just in case,’ he repeated with a sharp nod, wondering if the young woman would bolt as soon as her feet touched the ground.

With a brief look of confusion flitting across her face at his tone, Fran sat down and swung her legs over the edge.

‘We’ll have to be quiet… and quick, if we want any chance of sneaking past the Dead on the other side,’ she whispered, just as she started to lower herself over the surrounding wall.

‘Well more climbing, less talking, wouldn’t hurt,’ hissed Rod, his gaze flitting to the row of ruined hotels and shops on the opposite side of the road. ‘We won’t be on our own for long.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered Fran, letting her arms take the strain of her weight as she began to ease herself down the cable.

She had barely lowered herself a metre when the wall in front of her abruptly became a window, its darkly smeared glass hiding a multitude of imagined horrors in the shadowy interior. Peering past the grime and filth as she continued her way down to the ground, Fran thought she briefly saw movement in the gloomy ransacked office. But when nothing came charging at the window desperate to get to her, she put it down to simply her frayed nerves getting the better of her, and before she knew it she was crouched down on the weed choked pavement with her back to wall, looking back up at Rod.

‘
Come on, come on, come on,
’ she thought anxiously to herself, as she watched Rod beginning his slow descent, willing him to move faster.

Coming level with the dirty window, Rod also paused, sure he too saw something moving within abandoned Harbour Master’s office.

‘Hurry up!’ Fran hissed from below him, nervously eying movement amid the shadows of a collapsed souvenir shop across the road from them.

Rod, glanced down at her, his eyebrows creased together in annoyance.

‘I’m…’ he started to say just as a small pair of skeletal hands, their flesh lose and covered in mould, slammed against the glass in front of him.

‘Jesus!’ he gasped, startled by the sudden appearance of a Dead child.

Just how long the pathetic creature had been shut within the room, he had no idea but from the state of it, he guessed a long time. The child’s corpse blindly and slowly slapped its way across the glass just in front of him. Both of its eyes and much of the soft flesh from its skull and chest had at some point provided countless flies and their maggot offspring a tasty harvest and the sightless cadaver ambled past him, totally unaware of his presence. As it continued to move further around the Harbour Master’s office, he realised this child, that had been loved in life and its loss mourned for, would shamble within the room forever in a never ceasing search for its escape.

‘Christ,’ he muttered, finally tearing his eyes from the haunting figure of the trapped corpse.

‘Bad?’ whispered Fran, seeing the look in his eyes as Rod ducked down onto the pavement beside her.

‘Bad enough,’ he solemnly replied, using the wall to push himself upright again. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’

Despite his assurances, Fran instinctively stepped out in front of Rod to take the lead. Edging along the wall, she stole a quick glance when she reached the corner and was relieved to see that there were still only the four stubborn hungry corpses for them to get past. Looking back at Rod to make sure he was ready, she forced herself to take a calming breath and then with a prayer on her lips, she stepped out away from the wall.

***

Tom frantically clambered over the rocks, barely feeling the sharp scrape of broken mussel shells beneath his palms as he moved. He knew only a few metres above him, sanctuary, if only for a very brief while, awaited him; while to his back and below him there was only death and the Dead to greet him. Already the ravenous horde were following him up the steep incline, only their lack of agility preventing them from catching up with him. Yet even as the wall above him came within reaching distance he glanced back to see the hungry corpses had made deadly progress. Clawing their way over their Dead brethren in their desperation to get to him, the corpses were now also almost within grasping distance of their prize; namely him.