Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel (2 page)

Five years later.

Chapter 1: Another day of the usual.

‘Hurt them, Daddy,’ begged the girl, her voice full of gleeful menace. ‘Hurt them for me.’

‘Yes, Daddy. Cut them, cut them up,’ her younger sister giggled. ‘Cut them all up…’

Tom smiled to himself and allowed his daughter’s voices to fuel his rage against the Dead creatures before him. His wickedly sharp sickles, already slick with the dark blood and gore of previous kills, flashed through the air with alarming precision, severing decaying limbs with every swing of his arms.

‘Their heads!’ spat his wife, each word dripping with a dark urgency. ‘Remove their heads… end their existence… end it!’

‘For you,’ Tom muttered, easily slashing one of his blades through the grey skin of a Dead child’s neck.

For a moment the small ruined body stood there, rocking back and forth on its bare and blackened feet. Then, as gravity finally took control of its now lifeless body, it crumpled into the long grass; at last just a collection of rotting flesh. The decapitated head that rolled away only to eventually come to rest at the base of a large apple tree, was unfortunately another matter altogether. With the putrid brain within the Dead child’s skull still intact, a pair of milky film covered eyes continued to watch Tom’s every movement, forever eager for a taste of his living flesh. But Tom no longer concerned himself with this unfortunate creature, it was the other three lumbering corpses making their slow but determined approach that now drew his attention. And anyway, even as he allowed his killing frenzy to wrap about him like the smothering embrace of a strange but welcome friend, he knew in the back of his mind that he could not risk breaking his fragile blades by using them to puncture skulls.

‘Kill her,’ whispered his wife, while the cadaver of a young woman took a stumbling step towards him. ‘Cut her to pieces, Tom.’

Tom barely had time to take in the grey tinged skin stretched taught over the Dead woman’s emaciated face or the fact that one of her arms ended at the elbow in a tattering of torn and blackened curling skin. He simply stepped forward to greet her; a greeting he knew would end with the Dead woman falling to the rage that burned within him. No sooner had the Dead woman reached beseechingly for him with the stump of her ruined arm than Tom’s own arms were crossing, turning the blades of his sickle in a monstrous pair of deadly scissors.

‘Kill her!’ his wife hissed again, as Tom calmly closed the gap between himself and the ruined young woman.

With a yell of pure hatred escaping him, Tom swiftly uncrossed his arms, the curved blades in his hands slicing across each other and viciously ripping through the fragile skin of the Dead woman’s neck. Again, a head with hungry eyes came to rest somewhere amongst the heavily laden fruit trees and again it was instantly dismissed from his thoughts.

‘More, Daddy. More!’ giggled his youngest daughter.

Keen to oblige his daughter in her morbid request, Tom moved to engage the next approaching corpse. This time the creature had been a middle aged man in life and just what had transformed him into the walking abomination that now presented itself, desperate to quench its compelling hunger, Tom could only guess. Unlike his cadaverous travelling companions his body seemed to be intact and Tom couldn’t see any obvious bite marks on the exposed sallow skin of his arms and chest.

‘Unlucky sod,’ Tom muttered to himself, realising the poor fellow must have died of something far more natural than the hungry savagery of the Dead.         

To have survived for so long only to then die of something as pedestrian as an infection or an appendicitis seemed to Tom just another example of God’s unrelenting and cruel sense of humour. But Tom would not let the tiny spark of pity for the Dead thing deter him from bringing a swift and vicious end to its unnatural existence. For this decaying shell of a man, still clothed in the stinking and tattered remains of a filthy business suit, was but one of billions of other such shambling cadavers spread across the globe, each consuming Humanity piece by piece like a strange demonic cancer; and as long as Tom still had breath in his body he would not rest until he had removed each and every one of them; limb by limb if necessary.

Just like all of his kind, the Dead man raised his arms imploringly to Tom; somehow hoping the living flesh he craved would readily sacrifice itself to the hunger that consumed him. Yet no such sacrifice had ever willingly been made and even as the Dead man’s jacket and tattered skirt fluttered open to reveal an emaciated torso already being consumed by a dark and creeping mould, Tom raised his sickles ready to strike.

‘Tom! Behind you!’ came a woman’s voice he recognised but couldn’t place; her words full of panic and urgency.

Ignoring the Dead business man for a second, Tom spun just in time to knock aside the blackened claw like hands of another Dead man which had appeared from behind a tree, drawn to sounds of the living.

‘Kill them both, Daddy! Kill them, kill them, kill them,’ his eldest daughter chanted over and over, keen to see lifeless limbs fall to her father’s blades.

Torn between the Dead man in the suit and this new arrival, Tom looked back and forth between the two hungry corpses. From the charred state of one side of the second man’s body, he had clearly been the victim of a raging fire at some point; though whether this had been the actual cause of his death Tom would never know for sure but the bite size chunk missing from his left wrist hinted to a different cause of his demise.

‘You win, Crispy!’ Tom growled, choosing the burnt man who just at that moment happened to let forth a deep haunting moan through his cracked and twisted lips.

With the morning sunlight flashing across what little of the curved blade was still free of gore, the sickle in Tom’s right fist sliced through the air, effortlessly removing a burnt hand in its silent passing. Of course the loss of the appendage did nothing to deter the burnt corpse in its compulsion to latch onto the flesh so tantalisingly close to it and even before the severed hand had dropped to the ground it started to lean forward, its gaping jaws a deadly chasm of broken teeth and pus filled gums.

‘Tom…’ his wife warned with a sharp hiss. ‘Too close!’

Nodding, Tom managed to swiftly bring his left arm up, lodging it hard against the Dead man’s burnt chest. With just enough space to keep the snapping mouth shy of reaching its bloody goal, he gave the corpse a sharp and angry shove. Landing on its back with an all too human like grunt escaping its lifeless lungs, Tom saw his chance and stepped forward to bare down on the pitiful but deadly creature. Before the corpse had had a chance to right itself Tom’s heavy boot was crashing down on its head, obliterating what little of its features it had left and quickly turning its face into a dark stinking pulp.

‘Cut him… cut him up!’ his two daughters chanted, their voices little more squeals of delight.    

‘Kill it, Tom!’ screeched his wife. ‘Kill it for us!’

Again and again Tom slammed his foot down of the creature’s head and even when he heard the sickening crack of the skull cracking beneath his onslaught he continued his attack.

‘Destroy it, Tom!’ his wife barked menacingly.

‘Tom!’ came the voice of the unfamiliar woman again. ‘Tom!’

‘Yes, crush him, Daddy!’ his girls encouraged.

‘Tom!’ the woman yelled again, her words barely registering. ‘Tom, look out!’

Suddenly, despite his grunts, Tom managed to hear the sound of someone landing heavily beside him in the tall grass.

‘Kill her!’ screeched his wife, causing Tom to spin to meet his new attacker.

‘No!’ Fran screamed, jumping back just in time to avoid Tom’s blades as they sliced towards her. ‘Tom! Tom, it’s me… it’s Fran!’

Blinking, Tom took in the attractive young woman stood before him, her hazel eyes full of fear and concern for him. Slowly shaking his head to clear his confusion, Tom took a staggering step away from her.

‘Fran?’ Tom whispered, the stark reality of the orchard and how he had found himself there, slowly drifting back to him like wafts of smoke.

‘Yes!’ she replied with a grunt, already spinning to kick out at the Dead man in the suit, who had closed the gap between herself and Tom.

‘Are you back with us?’ she asked, darting forward to the suited man to stab a wickedly sharp looking knife through his eye socket and into his brain. ‘Tom, are you with us?’ she repeated, looking back at the man who had momentarily lost himself to his rage.

Tom looked about the small apple orchard, the heavily laden branches drooping under the weight of their ripe harvest and waited for his rapidly beating heart to return to normal. With each lung full of air he gulped down he could feel his breathing slowly return to normal and the adrenalin surging through his body begin to dissipate. More importantly though was that the voices of his wife and two daughters returned to the usual ghostly murmur that permanently itched somewhere in the back of his mind. Ever since he had returned to the small cottage, that he and his family had made their home, to find spilt blood and empty despair awaiting him he had carried their voices with him. They pleaded for retribution, they begged him for justice and they demanded revenge; and each time he willingly gave into their requests, if only to make himself feel better. Of course Tom knew his wife and two daughters were gone, transformed into monstrous creatures of decaying flesh that now roamed the countryside with but one thought consuming them; the need to feed on the living. But despite this he welcomed their voices when they came to him. He pulled them close and let their words wrap about his heart and all the while he begged for their forgiveness for having not been there when they had needed him most.

‘Err…Yeah,’ Tom whispered, using the crook of his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

Fran wiped her blade clean on the least unsavoury part of the now lifeless man’s jacket and push herself up from her knees.

‘You’re sure?’ she asked, slipping the knife back into the sheath tied onto her belt.

‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ Tom replied, his embarrassment tinged with a niggling but real concern that one day he may never be able to pull himself from the ghostly embrace of his lost family, ‘I got a little carried away there.’

‘Just a little,’ said Fran, moving over to the decapitated head of the child to grant it the eternal darkness it had been so cruelly denied.

‘You can come down now, Kai!’ she shouted up to a young man perched among the high branches of one of the apple trees.

With a wave of acknowledgement, Kai began to slowly make his way down through the branches to his two travelling companions. For a moment Fran watched his descent, idly taking in the movement of his solid arms, the curve of his broad shoulders and then with a little rush of embarrassment suddenly flushing blood to her cheeks, the way his jeans clung attractively to his backside.

Kai had spent the last five years safely hidden from the Dead behind the high walls of his boarding school, which with its vast grounds producing enough food for the students that had remained, his body had not yet taken on the lean look that was common among other survivors. But of course the high walls had not kept the Dead out forever and as always, it had ended badly; it had ended in blood. Few had escaped the Dead that day as they swept through the school like a wave of savage death and in fact both Tom and Fran themselves would have been torn to pieces if not for Kai’s quick thinking. But they had escaped, they had survived and more importantly they had formulated a plan. For Tom and Fran had not arrived at the school alone and although they had lost some of their number to the hungry Dead, others they had simply misplaced. But at least they had an idea of where their friends had fled to and although they had not come across them just yet they hoped to find them when they reached their goal, the island of St Michael’s mount.

‘Are yo… yo… you alright?’ Kai stammered, dropping from the lowest branch to land beside Fran in the tall grass.

‘He can’t help himself,’ she replied, her words soft enough that only Kai could hear. ‘And you’ve got to hand it to him, he’s bloody good with those blades.’

‘Yeah, b…b…but  F... F...’ Kai began, suddenly cutting himself off with a bark like cough from deep in his throat as if to reset the link between his mind and his mouth. ‘Fran you could have b… been seriously h…hurt.’

‘But I wasn’t,’ said Fran matter-of-factly, giving a brief shrug of her shoulders as she knelt down to finally deal with the child’s head.

Ignoring Kai’s disapproving grunt behind her, Fran gingerly manoeuvred the child’s head with her fingertips, trying her best to avoid touching it any more than necessary. Even without a body to feed, the child’s jaws still moved back and forth, snapping at Fran in their compulsion to rip into the living flesh that was now so tantalisingly close.

‘Sorry, little one,’ Fran mumbled, tilting the head back slightly while the blade of her knife hovered over its film covered right eye.

Fran looked briefly into the eyes of the Dead child and saw nothing of whom or what it had once been; nothing remained, nothing but a perverse shell of its former self. Just how this horror had befallen humanity Fran could not comprehend but as she looked into the face of the Dead child looking back at her with a pure animalistic hunger contorting its decaying features she feared Man as a species had finally run its course.