Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel (21 page)

‘Hello?’ the unseen woman repeated. ‘Hello, can you hear me? I’ve… I’ve got some clean clothes for you.’

With her finger help against her lips warning Jane to be quiet, Fran reached across to release the bolt locking the door.

‘It’s open, you can come in now,’ called Fran, stepping back into position behind the door.

Keeping a close eye on Jane’s reaction to whoever was about to come through the door, Fran did her best to ignore the fact she was dripping wet, completely naked and could possibly be about to fight for her life. It was hardly the most empowering of situations, but after what she had been through, anything was better than being caught unawares again.

‘It’s nothing fancy I’m afraid,’ said the unknown women, pushing open the door, ‘pretty much your standard GAP men’s shirts and jeans.’ ‘Oh, I thought…’ she continued, suddenly realising one of the metal tubs was empty.

From the exasperated and quite obvious ‘I told you so’ look on Jane’s face, Fran realised the woman clearly posed no threat to them.

‘Better safe than sorry,’ she mumbled, stepping out from behind the door, making the young woman jump.

‘Oh, there you are,’ said the young woman, clutching the pile of clothes to her chest. ‘You gave me a start. Do you often go round hiding behind doors jumping out at people? 

Realising her moment of relaxation had slipped through her slowly pruning fingers, Fran grabbed the other towel and wrapped it tightly about herself, all the while awkwardly holding the hunting knife in her hand.

‘Sorry,’ Fran replied, using the back of the hand holding the knife to push her damp hair back from her forehead, ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

Noticing the way the young woman’s eyes followed the blade as her hand moved, Fran consciously lowered it to her side.

‘Can’t be too careful these days,’ said Fran, giving a reassuring smile as she paused for the unknown woman to offer up her name.

‘Ryanne,’ the woman eventually replied, placing the pile of clothes down on a rickety looking wooden stool, ‘Ryanne Teel.’

‘Fran, Jane,’ said Fran, nodding over to Jane who had also reluctantly surrendered the comfort of her own bath.

‘Pleased to meet you, Ryanne,’ smiled Jane, extending her hand to hopefully make a better first impression than Fran had.

After all, Jane knew that with limited people on the island she could hardly afford to alienate anyone, not if this was to be their permanent home. She had already made up her mind that she and Riley would be staying no matter what. She just hoped that when the time came Dave would find the inner strength to stand up to Max and tell him that they were all staying without him. If not, then she knew there would be a terrible decision to be made, a decision that would devastate Dave no matter what he chose. To stay on the island with son and wife, or to leave them behind and go with his brother, either way Dave would lose someone he loved; she just prayed with all her heart it was Max.

‘So have you been off the mainland long?’ asked Jane, as Ryanne’s delicate hand slipped from hers.

‘Oh, I’ve been here since the Fall,’ Ryanne replied, her fingers entwining the small silver crucifix hanging on a chain about her neck.

Now that she had a proper chance to get a good look at Ryanne, Fran realised the woman wasn’t in fact as young as she had first thought. Discretely looking her up and down while her attention was on Jane, Fran could now see the subtle aging hidden in the woman’s face and the first emergence of grey hairs amid the dull and lank mousey brown hair. Whilst she had initially thought her to be in her early twenties, Fran could now see she was, at best, in her late thirties. There was also something about Ryanne that screamed ‘victim’ to Fran and it somehow made her feel uncomfortable. Whether it was her posture, her demeanour or even the very tone of her voice, Fran couldn’t pin it down but she knew if she had to spend any serious amount of time with this woman she might end up trying to shake some backbone into her.     

‘And with God’s grace,’ Ryanne continued, ‘and Father Matthew’s guidance I’ll never have to be among the Corrupt again.’

‘Wouldn’t count on it,’ Fran inadvertently chuckled, shaking her head as she reached for a man’s vest from the pile of clothes, ‘death is always…’

‘Father Matthew has been chosen!’ Ryanne suddenly snapped, cutting Fran’s words short, ‘Just as God gave each of us safe passage among the Corrupt, Father Matthew is His vessel to do His bidding…  He will keep us safe.’

‘Sorry, I…’ Fran began to say, wondering if she should re-evaluate her impression of Ryanne or if the fact that the woman had allowed herself to be brainwashed into believing that Father Matthew was indeed a source of Divine proclamations was just another symptom of her weak nature. 

‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ Ryanne rushed to interrupt, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment, ‘I shouldn’t have spoken like that… you are new here, you could not know. I’m…I’m sorry.’

With the vest paused just above her head, Fran’s eyes flicked briefly to Jane, looking for any sign that she too found the woman before them more than a little difficult to read.

‘Look,’ sighed Fran, swiftly slipping the vest over her head and pulling down it over her chest. ‘I think we may have got off on the wrong foot here, shall we start again? Hello, my name’s Fan,’ she continued, formally extending her right hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’

With a nervous laugh escaping her, Ryanne allowed her crucifix to slip from her fingers to take Fran’s offered hand.

‘Pleased to meet you too, Fran,’ said Ryanne, smiling as she limply pumped Fran’s hand up and down.

‘Ah, there you are Ryanne,’ said a pinched faced woman suddenly striding through the door with a basket under one arm, without so much as a polite effort to knock first. ‘What on earth’s been keeping you? Do I really have to do everything myself? Honestly, Ryanne, you’re beyond the pale you really are. I told you to take their washing down to Lucy and here you are chit-chatting like no one else has anything else to do all day.’

‘Sorry, Mrs Weaver,’ said Ryanne, ‘I was just…’

‘Yes, aren’t you always,’ sniffed the woman Ryanne had called Mrs Weaver. ‘Anyway, I’m here now, I might as well do it myself… it’s not that I haven’t got enough to do without having to make up for your dawdling.’

‘Oh, I think that may be our fault,’ interrupted Jane, receiving an incredulous glare for her troubles.

‘And you are?’ asked Mrs Weaver as if she had only just noticed the two half dressed woman in the room.

‘Oh, Mrs Weaver, this is Jane,’ said Ryanne, only just keeping the nervous quiver from her voice, ‘and this is Fran. Fan, Jane, this is Mrs Weaver.’

‘Good morning,’ said Mrs Weaver, with a curt nod, barley sparing the two women a glance. ‘Ryanne!’ she continued, swiftly turning her exasperated raised eyebrows back to her favourite proverbial ‘whipping boy’. ‘The laundry, Ryanne… come along, girl. I haven’t got all day.’

As Fran watched the browbeaten woman scurry about the small bathroom collecting their clothes for washing, she mused on the fact it was odd to hear someone of Ryanne’s age referred to ‘girl’, even from Mrs Weaver who was surely in her late fifties; but if this was the dynamic between the two women that Ryanne was willing to put up with, who was Fran to question it.

Holding out the empty basket for Ryanne to deposit the soiled clothes, Mrs Weaver tilted her head away slightly as if offended by the very presence of the gore splattered garments.

‘We’ll get these back to you later,’ she said, her eyes flitting distastefully over the knife Fran had put down to pick a pair of new jeans. ‘If the weather’s fine, they’ll probably be dry by this evening.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jane, zipping up a pale blue hooded jersey top. ‘A bath and now clean clothes, you really are spoiling us.’

‘It helps with lice infestations,’ Mrs Weaver simply replied, her eyes momentarily but blatantly dropping to the area of Jane’s crotch.

‘I can assure you…’ Jane began to say before Mrs Weaver pointedly spoke over her.

‘Ryanne, be sure to take them down to the refectory,’ she said, ignoring Jane’s flustered protestations, ‘Father Matthew is going to take our new arrivals on a proper tour of the island once they’ve eaten.’

With that, Mrs Weaver turned on her heel and abruptly left the room holding the basket at arm’s length in front of her.

‘What a bitch!’ said Jane, looking over at Fran, her mouth agape.

Seeing the complete look of shock on Jane’s face, Fran couldn’t help but give in to the bubble of laughter about to erupt from her throat.

‘Oh, Jane!’ laughed Fran, throwing her damp towel at the insulted woman. ‘Fuck, if the worst thing that happens to you is that old bag accuses you of having crabs, then you’re onto a winner, believe me!’

‘Oh, you mustn’t hold it against her,’ said Ryanne, nervously looking to the open door in case Mrs Weaver should return. ‘She doesn’t mean it… I mean, it’s just her way… You see, she used to be different before… before her husband… before he.’

Fran knew exactly what Ryanne was trying to say. Mrs Weaver had lost her husband to the Dead and, almost revelling in her loss, she had used it as an excuse to guilt trip, bully and belittle those weaker than herself.

‘Ryanne, that’s no excuse,’ Fran replied, her laughter slowly fading away. ‘We’ve all lost people we love, everyone has. I mean surely you…’

‘Oh, I never married,’ Ryanne quickly interrupted, as if to apologise that her life had not followed this ‘normal’ route, ‘and there was only really my father. He was quite ill… it was near his time anyway, so…’

The way Ryanne inadvertently dropped her eyes as she let the sentence hang unfinished hinted there was more to the loss of her father than she was willing to share but in a world of the Dead Fran knew everybody carried with them their own share of dark secrets, so let the topic drop.

‘These are new!’ she said, noticing that the price tag was still attached as she held the pair of jeans against her legs. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Marazion High Street was large enough to have its own GAP.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t,’ replied Ryanne, offering Fran a shirt to go over the vest she had already claimed. ‘One of the foraging parties found the delivery lorry stalled in a side street just on the outskirts of town. It was probably on its way to Truro and… and well the driver obviously never got there.’

‘Well, Truro’s loss is my gain,’ said Fran, smiling as she snapped free the plastic tag holding the label in place
.

With a pleasure verging almost on the sexual, Fran slipped her legs into the ‘virgin’ pair of jeans and pulled them up over her slim hips. To feel the clean, as in truly clean, fabric against her freshly washed skin was an experience she thought she had consigned to her past.
So as she ran her fingers along taught denim covering her thighs she couldn’t help the small gleeful smile spreading across her mouth.

‘Sorry,’ smiled Fran, noticing the look on Ryanne’s face, ‘it’s been a while since I’ve had clothes on that were more than just rags held together by dried on blood and gore.’

‘Is… is it very bad?’ asked Ryanne out of the blue, ignoring Fran’s explanation. ‘I mean on the mainland… with the Corrupt. Is it as bad as Father Matthew and the others tell us?’

Suddenly Fran’s fingers lost interest in the smooth clean denim enveloping her legs and as her hands fell limply to her sides she realised no matter how bad it was on the mainland or how good it was here, she would be back among the Dead again all too soon.

‘Yes,’ Jane simply answered in Fran’s stead. ‘It’s hell… and just thank God that you’re not there.’

‘I do,’ Ryanne replied, the two words almost a whisper as her hand instinctively reached up to once again caress the crucifix about her neck.

For a few seconds each of the women stood in silence, letting their own thoughts consume them. For Ryanne she sent a silent prayer of thanks to a God that had spared her. For Jane it was relief tinged with the worry that Dave would chose his brother and abandon her. While for Fran it was the hope that she could find the inner strength to return to a life built of fear and death. But there was also something else flitting amongst the hidden shadows of Fran’s mind, something that both scared and entranced her. Something that to simply acknowledge its presence would be to open a floodgate of feeling, a flood she doubted she could cope with just yet. And even though she turned away from them, she somehow knew when these waters at last rushed over her only one word would be whispered by the flowing tides, only one name would calm the eddies that churned about her and that name was Kais.

‘Did someone say something about some breakfast?’ Fran eventually said with a forced chuckle, shaking herself from her own unsettling thoughts.

***

With their newly scrubbed bodies and a set of fresh clean clothes, Jane and Fran could almost pretend that the horrors of the last five years had been nothing but some terrible nightmare. Unfortunately this welcome daydream was somewhat let down for them both by the scuffed boots they each wore; still baring the filth and splatter marks of their time among the Dead, they were, like weary battle scars, an inescapable reminder of the terrifying reality they had been forced to endure.

Following Ryanne along the seemingly countless landings, staircases and cold, portrait-lined, draughty corridors, the two women were forced to listen to her gushing praise for the apparently Holy Father Matthew. Fran had seen this type of behaviour before; men and women, saved from a horrendous fate, would not so much place their saviour on a pedestal but lift them up, way past the mere celebrity of Guru or rock star status, but transform the ordinary mortal into almost the Divine. It was a dangerous line to walk for all concerned and even with humanity scattered and stretched to its limits, tales of Death cults and twisted Nero-like leaders were talked of in hushed and fearful whispers.