Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead (35 page)

In their feeding frenzy the Dead women had greedily torn chunks of bloody flesh from the man’s arms, legs and torso. Lost in their compulsion to feed they had revelled as they ripped free much of the flesh from the left side of his face; one fortunate Dead woman going so far as to pluck out his left eye just before he died. But died he had and as was the way in this world his path through the darkness of death had proved to be a short one. Even now as he ran towards Liz, shredded skin flapped back and forth about his chin while thick dark blood oozed from his exposed eye socket. Yet none of this mattered to Baxter’s cadaver, all that concerned this creature was his need to rip, tear and bite into the living flesh that consumed him.

‘Move!’ she hissed to Sally, the word dripping with urgency and fear as she roughly pulled the woman past the corner.

‘Go!’ she cried, pushing Sally past her. ‘Take the second left like Fran said… Hurry!’

From the way he moved Liz could tell they had no hope of outrunning Baxter’s corpse and if Anne and Sally were to have any chance to escape, she needed to deal with him here and now. Unfortunately she knew stopping the Dead creature that had once been Baxter would take more than a single strike of her blade, his very height making it almost impossible to remove his head in one go; she would have to disable him some other way. So, doing her best to ignore the hammering of her heart in her chest, Liz crouched down with her back pressed against the panelled wall and waited for the abomination to appear.

With the rumble of his footsteps getting louder, Liz took a deep breath to calm herself.

‘Three… two,’ she whispered, counting down the seconds before the hungry cadaver appeared.

Before she could count down to zero the ravaged corpse suddenly skidded to a halt in front of her, eager to follow the living he knew had fled this way.

‘One!’ she growled, swinging her blade as hard as she could towards the tall corpse’s knees.

With an almost surprised look on what was left of Baxter’s features, the bloody cadaver turned its ruined face to the unexpected sound of her voice. But Liz’s knew this could be her only chance and before the Dead man even had a chance to reach for her, her blade was tearing through muscle, cartilage and tendon; amputating his left leg to send him tumbling to the floor.

‘Zero!’ Liz cried, jumping up from her crouch to swiftly bring her sword down on the Dead man’s exposed neck while he struggled to right himself.

In the blink of an eye, one moment the Dead man’s head was attached to his shoulders and the next it was rolling across the floor. Before the decapitated head had even come to rest Liz was running; she had to catch up with Sally and with the Dead horde on her heels she had no time to waste. Sprinting down the corridor, Liz almost threw herself round the turning she knew Sally had taken, her eyes automatically going to the two figures huddled by a closed door further down the hallway.

‘Lizzie!’ cried Anne, relief at her sister’s safe reappearance bringing tears to her eyes.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ said Sally, her own features contorted with worry.

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Liz panted, quickly leaning forward to kiss the top of Anne’s head.

‘The Dead… they’re already out there,’ Sally replied, nodding toward the small glass panel set in the door.

***

With nothing but a few intermittent skylights to illuminate her way, Fran ran along the dim narrow hallway she knew would take her to the room holding Carmella with her newly born son, Vincenzo. Just what she was going to do about Freya, if she was still there, she hadn’t yet decided. Liz hadn’t specifically told her either way if she should or should not bring the young woman with them; after all she had lied to Sally and Anne to get them into the basement. Yes, it had been in a fruitless attempt to save her sister from Kyle’s wrath but Fran didn’t know just how forgiving Liz and the others were prepared to be; could they really ever trust the woman again.

Behind her the ominous moans of the Dead as they made their slow but steady progress through the ground floor corridors of Saint Xavier’s drifted up to compete with the rhythmic pounding of her feet as she ran.  Although she doubted the Dead horde had made it as far as the bottom of the stairs just yet she knew she would have to find another way down if she wanted to avoid coming into contact with them altogether, especially if Carmella’s hadn’t regained some of her strength during the night. The last thing she wanted was to have to fight her way out while supporting Carmella’s weakened body, it would be a nigh on impossible task.

‘Which door?’ she panted to herself, skidding to a sudden halt in front of five possible closed doors.

It was not that she expected to open the wrong door to find a surprised stranger looking back at her, after all there were far more rooms than ‘inmates’ at Saint Xavier’s, it was more that her mind had just suddenly gone blank.

‘Carmella!’ she loudly called out, stepping over to the nearest door, hoping the woman would hear her and reply.

When no reply came to her, she turned the handle anyway. It was locked.

‘Carmella, are you in there?’ she tried again, wondering if perhaps Freya had locked her in before going off somewhere.

Rattling the handle again almost for her own piece of mind rather than anything else, Fran pressed her ear to the door and listened; nothing. But then she heard a thump coming from one of the rooms further down the corridor. Peering along the hallway she noticed that a dark metal key was lying partly hidden in shadow on the floor in front of one of the closed doors, as if it had fallen from its place in the lock.

‘Carmella!’ she called again, running to the door.

Transferring her stolen long bow to her left hand she scooped up the key, hurriedly replaced it and began to turn the stiff lock.

‘I’m coming!’ she called, hearing another worrying thud from within the room.

With a ‘click’ the lock mechanism suddenly turned and with a shove, Fran pushed open the door and instantly froze.

The small room that only the night before had been a welcome retreat from the world beyond the walls of Saint Xavier’s had been transformed into a horrific bloodbath born of the worst of nightmares. Dark sticky blood seemed to drip and pool on every surface, while small chunks of indefinable flesh and skin appeared scattered about the room as if torn from their host in wild abandon. But it was the two bloody figures turning to look at her with milky Dead eyes that caused her head to spin and the alarming darkness to swirl at the edge of her vision.

Freya, her torn floral pinafore dress drenched by a sea of dark clotting blood, looked at Fran with an all-consuming hunger. In the brief time before she had reanimated as one of the Dead, Carmella had clearly been able to feast well on the unfortunate young midwife. Strips of flesh running from the left side of her neck and across her face had been greedily ripped free by Carmella’s teeth and hands and her left shoulder had been flayed bare, revealing savaged muscle and tendon beneath; while in her frenzy Carmella had also reduced the right side of the young woman’s chest to little more than shredded skin on a glistening and exposed ribcage. But it was Freya’s mauled stomach that sickened Fran the most. In her newly Dead state her corpse, unable to withstand the burning compulsion to devour the tiny living thing inside her, had violently clawed and ripped away at her own flesh to get to it. Luckily the infant had not lasted long under its mother’s crazed attack and by the time Freya had finally plucked it from her tattered womb it was already dead and instantly discarded as worthless. With her abdominal muscles torn to shreds there was nothing to keep Freya’s internal organs in place and even now as she took a shaking step toward Fran something dark and bloody slipped free to join the rest of the bloody carnage already covering the carpet.

‘No…’ Fran managed to whisper in horror as bloody hands reached out to her.

But the two Dead women would hear no pleas of mercy and even as Freya’s cadaver took another stumbling step, spilling yet more vital organs in the process, Carmella’s corpse pushed her way forward; eager to feel Fran’s warm flesh tearing between her teeth. Still frozen by the scene of the two ravaged women slowly advancing towards her, Fran desperately tried to suck air into her lungs to regain control of her limbs. Carmella was close enough now that Fran could see the scraps of stolen flesh stuck between her bloody teeth and as the image of the woman tearing into the defenceless body of her new born suddenly flashed through her mind, Fran screamed. It was a scream not born of fear or despair but rather of anger, of rage and of hate. Hate for whatever had caused Carmella to come back to claim the life of not only her own child but also of the woman who had helped bring it into the world; anger that a God could so abandon his most innocent of children and rage against life in a world they could no longer call their own.

Almost instinctively Fran struck out at the thing that had been Carmella with the bow in her left hand. Unfortunately the glancing blow had little effect but to snap the Dead woman’s head abruptly to one side and in fact cracked the shaft of the bow in the process, rendering it now useless as a weapon. Dropping it, Fran prepared herself for the inevitable attack that was to come. Despite the horrors that stood before her, Fran felt a comfortable calmness descend upon her and in the back of her mind she could almost hear her father’s voice instructing her, just like he had on that first day in his martial arts class.

‘Legs apart Frannie…left foot forward… turn slightly… reduce the area of your body open to attack… not too much or you’ll find it difficult to counterattack… left elbow in to cover your ribs… hands up…palms flat ready to strike… good, Frannie… that’s my girl…’

‘Yahh,’ Fran cried, twisting at the waist to kick out with hard her right leg.

Her blow to the solar plexus, which could have caused some serious damage to a living assailant, merely knocked Carmella’s cadaver back into the room and into Freya.

‘If you can’t beat your attacker, Frannie… retreat!’ came her father’s warning from somewhere in her past.

Fran looked at the two Dead women struggling to right themselves on the blood and gore splattered carpet and knew she had no hope of putting both of them down permanently, not without risking getting bitten herself. So taking heed of her lost father’s words she used the small window of opportunity she had given herself, turned and ran.

***

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Sally, glancing back down the corridor, fearful the horde of Dead women to appear at any moment.

‘I don’t think we have much choice,’ Liz replied, looking back from the small glass panel in the door to Sally. ‘We’ve got to make a run for the cart.’

‘But…’ Sally began, the ominous sound of the moaning Dead cutting off her words.

‘Sally, we don’t have time for this,’ said Liz, pulling the woman to her feet and picking up Anne.

‘I’m going to need you to carry Anne,’ she continued, passing her sister over to Sally. ‘I’ll keep any of the Dead away from you both… you just have to run, OK?’

‘Lizzie,’ said Anne, her fear clearly evident.

‘Look, if we’re going to do this, we need to go now,’ said Liz ignoring Anne’s fear to concentrate on the task at hand. ‘If we leave it any longer there’ll just be too many of the Dead in the grounds and we’ll never get to the cart in one piece…’ 

Double checking through the small window that the coast was a clear as it was going to be, Liz gave one last look back at Sally and Anne.

‘Ready?’ she said, her hand hovering on the door handle.

Adjusting the position of Anne in her arms, Sally simply gave a Liz a nervous nod in reply.

‘OK,’ muttered Liz to herself as her hand pushed down the door handle, releasing the lock.

The door had barely opened wide enough for her to slip through when a gust of rainy wind brought her not only the distinct moans of the Dead but also the pitiful screams for help from those still under attack.

‘Stay close and stay low,’ she called back to Sally, raising her voice to be heard over the sounds of the wind, rain and ensuing slaughter. ‘No matter what you see, don’t stop, just get to the cart… nothing else matters. You’ve just got to get Anne to the cart…’

Sure that Sally followed close behind her, Liz crouched down by a large fruit bush and quickly worked out a path that avoided getting too close the Dead. Then making a quick visual search of the vast vegetable plots for her friends, she was disappointed to only find Tyrone amidst the bloody melee. At the moment he was using a spade to pound the skull of a Dead man at his feet to a bloody pulp but Liz could already see another six of the Dead were quickly closing in on him. Within seconds he would need her help but first she had a job to do.

‘Now!’ she cried, pulling Sally with her as she darted forward along a small path.

Weaving through the vegetable patches, her anxious gaze flitted from one approaching cadaver to the next, each time trying to judge if they would be within grabbing distance as they ran past it. It had all been going well until almost three quarters of the way across the grounds she saw what had been an overweight man in life dragging his sagging and maggot ridden grey flesh through a row of potato plants and into her path.

‘I’ll deal with him!’ she called over her shoulder to Sally, ‘Just dodge round and keep running, the cart’s not far now…’