Six Days With the Dead (2 page)

When she got down to the kitchen
, Alice was already there with Sister Rebecca making porridge.

‘
You’re up early. Couldn’t sleep?’ Sister Rebecca asked, as she stirred the big pot.

‘
Just the usual, you know...’ Liz didn’t like to talk about the dreams.

She knew everyone had been through their own horrors. In fact Alice had barely escaped some men who had turned on the weaker members of a community in which she thought she h
ad found refuge.  Killing one while he was raping her, she fled into the Dead lands, alone and unarmed, leaving the men to deal with him as he came back hungry.

‘
My God! At least you don’t see the dead turning on each other.’ Liz had exclaimed when Alice had first told her.

‘
No… and no matter what anyone says at least they don’t have control over what they do. They’re like a computer running through the same program over and over again. Feed, that’s all they can do. It’s just our bad luck that we happen to die while that program is running.’ Alice had replied, ‘No, the world may be filled with monsters Liz but not all of them are the Dead.’

‘
Do you want some porridge Liz?’ Sister Rebecca asked, as she ladled some in to bowl.

At seventy, Sister Rebecca had been lucky to have been cloistered in the convent with the other nuns when the world fell apart seven years ago. Having lived so long on the outside of society, the nuns way of life hadn
’t really changed that much. They still farmed their own vegetables, reared their chickens and goats and collected the honey from the bee hives. The only difference now was that there was no electricity and that they now had the horses that had been found abandoned in a field. They had used the last of their petrol collecting them but they were certainly worth their weight in gold now. Luckily, the Dead were relatively scarce in the surrounding countryside then and with Sister Claire growing up on a farm, they had collected them swiftly without drawing attention to themselves. After the water went off, the convent sisters collected rain water for a long time until one of their visitors had rigged up a manual pump drawing water from a nearby stream.

‘
With the grace of God and our Holy Mother, we will survive’ was a constant phrase at the convent and it seemed the Lanherne Convent was one of the few places God seemed to look upon favourably.

Liz gratefully took the bowl of steaming porridge from Sister Rebecca
.

‘
Do we have any honey?’ She asked.

S
he knew she had grown soft over the last year, enjoying many luxuries she never thought possible in the years of just barely surviving. Not just the big things like a place to sleep without the constant fear that Dead hands and
teeth would come out of the dark, claiming you or those you loved but simple things like warm food in your belly and a chance to wash, that was more than a dip in a cold river. She had grown into an attractive young woman but thought nothing of stripping off her clothes in front of Charlie for a brisk river wash, as did he. It was just normal. It could mean the difference between being clean and alive or hanging around behind a bush waiting to be alone. When you were naked and alone, alone could get you killed damn quick. Privacy and prudishness were now just one of the many forgotten things of an old world. 

‘
One washes, one watches.’ Charlie always said.

So to be able to have a warm shower or bath and washed clothes
, now seemed like heaven. Yes, you had to pump the water yourself and fill the old metal claw-foot bath, bucket by bucket as it boiled on the range. But Boy! Was it worth it.

‘
Here,’ Alice said, as she pulled the jar from the cupboard, ‘and I thought I was going to have to shake you out of your bed this morning. Only half an hour early for shift, that’s practically slovenly for you.’ A smile creeping on her face.

Liz was well known for always being last off shift and first on. It was if she still couldn
’t relax. In her head she doubted she ever really would. With Anne to protect she just couldn’t trust other people with their lives. What if they fell asleep on watch? What if they thought that shadow by the tree was just a shadow, when maybe it wasn’t.  No, the only eyes and instincts she truly trusted were her own and Charlie’s. The Dead mainly moved slowly but if you didn’t keep your wits about you, they were on you before you knew it and then you had a new fast and very angry corpse to deal with too. That was the odd thing about the Infected, for the first few hours when they first came back the Dead would be wild and fast, tearing at everything and everyone to get to flesh. These were the most dangerous.

In the beginning whole
communities were wiped out overnight as the Dead fled hospitals and field stations, wild and bloody, attacking all they came in contact with. The infection spread outwards like the ripple on a pond surface, their numbers increasing exponentially with every ripple. Then after the first few hours, they slowed like a spent wind-up toy, the speed in their limbs evaporating. They would still kill you if they got you cornered or outnumbered but at least with these you had a chance. If you kept calm you could even walk right past them, their strained, tortured movements slow to react. Charlie thought it was because when the Infection first brought the Dead back, the brain was still fresh, with more or less normal motor control. Over time this would deteriorate as the brain itself decayed. They had seen many of the infected Dead from the early days, who had been so exposed to the elements that their brain could only be little more than a soup in their skulls. Corpses in fields with parchment thin skin, unable to do little more then follow them with their dry filmy eyes, if they had them, would still let loose a faint deathly moan from their withered lungs. You were vigilant where you stepped through high grass. Each step you took a careful one, for ankles were just the right height for slow Dead mouths with death on their hungry shrivelled lips.

People had give
n up trying to find out why the Dead had refused to stay dead.  As always religion and science fought with each other, saying they knew best. A mutation of the Syphilis virus becoming air born and then staying dormant in the cranial fluids until deprived of oxygen had been quite popular for a while. But they had had their pick, ranging from bio-terrorism to an extra-terrestrial bacteria and of course every Government under the sun was to blame. But at the end of the day when the Dead were fighting over bloody organs ripped from a chest of someone you loved, the ‘whys’ didn’t really matter all that much. As always the wrath of God argument came and went but was never truly popular. In a world filled with such tragedy, no one liked to think they had been so completely abandoned and punished by the Divine. 

‘
Thanks,’ Liz said, as she spooned the dark gold honey over the porridge, ‘Are you on patrol with me then?’

‘
Yep, just you and me for the next six hours walking the wall… Can’t wait.’ Alice said, reaching for her coat. 

Alice
’s favoured weapon was a metal baseball bat, which always seemed to be within arm’s reach, no matter where she was.

‘
Come on, we might as well get going.’ She continued picking up her bat, as Liz finished off the last of her warming porridge.

‘
Thanks Sister Rebecca, lovely as always.’ Liz said, handing back the now empty bowl with a smile.

‘
You’re welcome dear. Now off you two go. I tell you, I always feel safer when you two girls are watching out for us on the walkway. Damian and Sally are up there at the moment and I think they’re more interested in each other than if the Dead are pawing the walls,’ the Nun said, rolling her eyes, ‘You should have seen the love bites on her neck this morning. You’d have thought the Dead had been at her already.’

Sister Rebecca had a surprising talent for gossip for a woman who had spent a good p
ortion of her life in a convent but there was no malice behind it.

Damian had joined their small community six months ago, making his attraction for Sally quite obvious. With Damian only twenty-two and Sally in her late forties, they were a bit of an odd couple. They had taken solace in each other
’s arms, despite the age difference. Of course Liz couldn’t blame them but she wished they could show more control when other people’s lives were on the line. Liz herself had found similar comfort with Imran. His soft touch and dark sensitive eyes had calmed her in a way she never thought possible. She loved the secret moments they stole together. Their love making brought joy into a life of tragedy and struggle, even if just for a short while.

‘
Ok then let’s go and see what’s happening in the big bad world.’ Liz said, following Alice out of the Kitchen.

****

Liz and Alice slowly made their way through the dim lit corridors. As always there was a chill here, the only warming light coming from the small leaded windows running along one side. She could see it was a beautiful morning outside, the sun just breaking through the last of the clouds. As they strolled, Liz was given snap shots of the outside world. Each window they passed, ‘click’ a new image. If she could run down here at super speed would the walls disappear entirely, she wondered to herself, each frozen image joining the next like a roll of film, and then in one of the images a figure appeared. With the sun just behind him he was thrown in to shadow. A silhouette with long lithe limbs, moving purposefully down the gravel path. Limbs, only she knew the tender touch of. ‘Imran!’ she thought to herself and as if the sun has just come out from behind a cloud, the corridor felt slightly lighter, warmer, more welcoming, than it had done mere seconds ago.

As always he carried his
trusted bow. On his back arrows could be seen neatly packed in their quiver, death, to be dispatched at a moment’s notice with a twang of his bow. His accuracy was well known among the convent refugees. He had stopped many of the Dead in their tracks, saving souls for another day. A sniper lost from another time, his arrows would fly through the air dropping the dead where they stood. The needed ‘brain’ shot with every release of his bow. Liz was slightly jealous of Imran in that respect. He could fight at a distance, well away from the stench and the horrors that were the Dead. As swift and as capable as she was at removing rotten heads from shoulders with her sword, she still then had the not so pleasant task of knifing the now bodiless head. To be that close to the dead faces, their tongues black and dried like carrion in their mouths, turned her stomach. Even without a body to feed, the heads would still strain their jaws to get to any live flesh that was near. Silent moans never escaping their lips, still desperate to render and tear skin, flesh and tendon. Steadying the head she would turn their empty eyes away from her. Thankful for her thick canvas gloves at least removing the displeasure of having to touch their maggot ridden flesh. Then using the same sword, she would plunge sharply down, puncturing the skull and sending the corpse back to the stillness nature demanded. Of course most of the time she wasn’t afforded the luxury of stopping the Dead permanently for another corpse would be stepping up to fill its fallen brothers place, with more cracked decaying flesh reaching for her. No, more often than not, once a head was dispatched, the Dead were pushed aside while she moved onto the next.  A few times she had had to end the torment of someone she knew who had come back. For them, this little act of mercy was her gift. She did not want to think of her friends being the sad walking shells of what they once were, becoming the very thing they had fought for so long and so hard against was beyond acceptance. For these, her sword gladly broke through scalp and bone to end the bastardised existence these brains forced upon their rotting hosts.

Liz and Alice reached the
end of the corridor, pulling open the large oak door. As soon as they passed the threshold, the silence was left behind them. It was if the walls themselves refused to acknowledge this strange new world that surrounded them. The sunlight warmed them and the sounds of nature became a pleasant background murmur. The very smells of the garden itself reminded them that life went on, even when surrounded by so much death.

The tall shadow fell over Liz. Holding a hand up to shield her eyes she looked up.

‘Hi Imran.’ She said, as she reached up to stroke his arm affectionately.

Then as he stepped to the side the light fell across him, showing his face clearly.

‘Oh, sorry Mohammad, I thought you were Imran.’

She lowered her arm feeling slightly embarrassed, though
she had no reason to feel this way. Imran and his brother were identical twins. Most people found it difficult to tell them apart but Liz didn’t usually make this mistake. Imran had something in the way he looked at her. He somehow knew what she was thinking just from a glance.   

Imran and his brother had been lucky to escape L
ondon with their family. Like all cities, London had become a domain of the Dead, a wasteland. The sheer number of people who had lived there, meant the infection had claimed almost the whole city within a few days.

Travelling into the less densely populated areas, the family had fought to survive like everybody else. They had fa
ired better in the larger communities where there was some diversity but when they came to the smaller outposts, the Muslim family stood out and were often the target for the small minded. It didn’t seem to matter that Imran’s father had only been an accountant and his mother had worked in a library, people scared and needing some-one to blame saw them only as the mythical  bio-terrorists, figures to blame for all the nightmares that had become all too real. Then two years after the End of everything, some men came for their family, drunk and blind with vengeance. The brothers had only escaped when their father had pushed them into a cupboard as the mob stormed the house. Holding each other in the dark they wept silently, trying to block out the screams of their mother and sister. The men had made their father watch as his wife and daughter were raped and murdered in front of him. When they had finished they then viciously beat and tore at their father, until he too was taken from the boys. Finally the mob left, allowing the two boys to flee into the night. They swore vengeance for their murdered family, vengeance that they took in full, four years later. In one night they took one life after another from the community that had ripped their family apart and by the time dawn came the dead walked freely behind those walls with no-one to challenge them.