Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead (32 page)

‘Over… here!’ she heard him reply from somewhere in the dense forest to their right.

Seeing nothing but a wall of trees in front of them, Fran broke into a run.

‘Where?’ she called again, expecting at any moment to hear a terrified scream as unseen teeth savagely tore into his warm bloody flesh.

Yet all she heard in reply as she crashed through the undergrowth that seemed intent on scratching, snagging and clawing at her as she ran, was the snapping of twigs and muffled sound of a struggle. But then all of a sudden the trees seemed to part in front of her, unexpectedly opening up to reveal one of the small rainwater collecting clearings that Emma had told them about the previous day.

‘Well don’t just fucking stand there!’ cried Brett from where he lay on the ground next to an overturned barrel, his legs entangled in a thick tarpaulin while he frantically struggled to keep the corpse of the large Dead man on top of him from taking the bite it so desperately craved.

Darting forward, her crowbar already raised, Fran took in the scene before her and in an instant replayed what had most likely happened. She could so easily see Brett, so full of foolish bravado, advancing carelessly upon the large cadaver, not even stopping to think that if he swung his pipe high enough to ensure a killing blow that he would also bring the suspended tarpaulin above him crashing down.

‘
Christ,
how have you managed to last this long?
’ thought Fran, the crowbar in her hand already in motion, acting like nothing more than an extension of her arm as the end of it collided with the back of the Dead man’s head.

With a ‘crack’ that echoed around the small clearing, the Dead man’s head snapped violently to one side; a large dent abruptly appearing where Fran’s weapon had struck home.

‘Are you bitten?’ grunted Fran, grabbing hold of the back of the corpse’s mould covered jacket to pull the now motionless body off of Brett.

‘Fuck!’ panted Brett, shakily gulping down air as he at last freed himself from under the weight of the Dead man’s corpse.

‘I said were you bitten, Brett?’ Fran repeated, watching as he scrambled desperately away from the man’s body on all fours, a look of fear tinged relief contorting his features. ‘Brett! Brett, did it bite you?’

Despite Fran almost shouting at the young man still only a few metres away from her, it was as if he simply couldn’t hear her and then as his panic stricken mind finally began to realise he had survived the encounter, Brett warily got to his feet, turned and stared mutely back at the Dead man’s body; almost as if he half expected it to come at him again.

‘Brett…’ Fran started to ask once more, just as he darted forward and angrily began to stamp on the already misshapen head of the corpse.

‘You Fucker! You fucking fat stinking Fucker!’ he spat, the aftermath of his fear, panic and Fran thought possibly his embarrassment too, fuelling his continued and pointless attack. ‘Who’s dead now… you… fat… Fucker!’ he continued to rage, punctuating each word with a blow from his boot. ‘You… stinking… piece… of… shit!’

‘Brett! Brett, it’s dead… it’s gone,’ said Fran, wondering if she should try to physically pull him away from the corpse whose head was fast becoming an unrecognisable mess. ‘Brett… come on... let it go… let it go.’

Suddenly an ear-splitting whistle sounded from behind Fran, jolting Brett from his frenzied episode and pausing his foot mid-stamp, hovering over the pulpy remains of the Dead man’s face.

‘You d…done?’ asked Kai, stepping into the clearing. ‘G…good,’ he continued, without waiting for a reply. ‘Let’s c…carry on, shall we?’

‘The Fucker got the jump on me,’ grumbled Brett, as if to explain what had just happened. ‘If I hadn’t got caught up in the sheet…’

‘
It’s not the sheet that almost got you killed,
’ thought Fran, while Brett continued to mumble his excuses, ‘
it’s being a prat.
’

Yet if Fran had hoped his brush with death may have taught Brett to approach the Dead with a little more caution or even forethought, she was to be sadly mistaken. For no more than five minutes later he was once again charging towards the soft tinkling of bells, oblivious that he may be racing to meet his demise head on; his only intent to prove to himself and those with him that he would not be bested or shown up by the Dead.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ muttered Fran, once more charging after Brett with Kai following just a few steps behind her.

But this time as she burst from behind a group of trees, out onto a moss covered hillock, she was surprised to find herself almost ploughing directly into Brett’s back.

‘Whoa,’ she gasped, only just sidestepping him at the last moment. ‘You could give us some warning, I almost…’

And then Fran noticed just what had frozen Brett in his tracks. For there, stumbling through the trees towards them was a Dead woman; a Dead woman with the remains of a young child still held within the carrier strapped facing her chest. What made the scene of the shambling cadaver, forever locked in this parody of maternal concern, even more tragic than normal was the fact that up until a few months ago this woman had clearly been alive; she had been a survivor. Her skin, though sallow and tinged the usual sickly shade of grey, had not yet succumbed to the blooms of mould or the ravages of insect attack like on the other, older corpses they generally saw.

‘Shit,’ muttered Fran, glancing to Brett and somewhat relieved to see a similar look on his face to her own.

‘She must’ve turned quickly… before she could do anything to stop herself,’ said Brett, surprising even himself that he acknowledged the corpse with its throat torn open as a female rather than referring to it as the usual
it
. ‘She… she ate her own baby, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah… looks like it,’ she replied with a sigh, following the trail of long since dried gored from the cadaver’s mouth, down its chin and to the small ruined corpse still trapped in the carrier; a pair of small bare grey legs hanging limply either side.

Fran could only imaging the horrific scene as the mother, her own life fading with each pump of her heart, desperately fought to save her baby but knowing even as the blood slipped across her own fingers that she would ultimately be responsible for her child’s tragic demise. And then as she finally fell, at last leaving her life, fears and concerns behind her, something new awoke within her shell; something that minutes later forced open her eyes to look upon the world with a new and horrific perspective. This shell could no longer look upon the child it carried with affection. It could not see the baby as something it should protect or cherish. For whatever had forced a strange and unnatural life into the body of woman, it was no longer capable of such thoughts or ideas. Only one thought consumed this creature of death, only one act it needed to perform and only one thing that drove its purpose, it needed to feed; and feed it did.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Fran stepping past Brett, to finally lay the Dead woman to rest.

‘Okay,’ Brett slowly mumbled in reply, all thoughts of points and game playing suddenly put aside.

Watching as the Dead woman stumbled over the uneven ground towards her, moaning with hunger-fuelled excitement, Fran couldn’t help but stare at one of the child’s small sockless feet; its tiny toes little more than withered black stubs.

‘
Please already be dead… Please already be dead,
’ she prayed, hoping that the Dead woman’s attack on her child had left too little behind to reanimate.

Yet even though Fran could see one of its small arms had savagely been torn away, as she stepped forward to meet the Dead woman’s corpse head on she saw the top of the child’s head begin to turn; straining to see what had caused such interest to the creature that had not only once given it life but had ultimately also taken it away.

‘Damn it!’ sighed Fran, her heart aching at the pure waste of life before her.

Closing the gap between them, Fran looked at the Dead woman and with a true sorrow knew she would never know her story. She would never know how or where this woman had survived the last few years, hiding herself and her child from the Dead. She would never be told who had fathered the child she carried with her, where he was or if he himself had survived; and she would never know what name this woman had whispered to her baby as she lay frightened in the dark of the night, wishing things had been different.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fran murmured, at last closing the gap; her crowbar already moving through the air.

With a wet thud, the hook end of the metal rod smashed into the side of the Dead woman’s temple, causing the cadaver to briefly stumble backwards before finally collapsing in a heap at the base of a tree.

‘It’s still alive,’ said Brett behind her, as the Dead woman’s left arm started to spasm and thrash about as of its own accord.

‘Just some left over brain activity,’ said Fran trying to sound more confident than she felt while gingerly stepping between and over the creature’s sprawled legs.

‘B…be careful,’ she heard Kai warn anxiously as she manoeuvred herself around the corpse.

‘I don’t think this one will be getting up again,’ mumbled Fran, using the end of her crowbar to tilt the Dead woman’s misshapen head back and forth. ‘Like I said, it’s just...’

She was just about to once again dismiss the movement as nothing more than the last electrical impulses from a brain reluctant to relinquish its unnatural hold over the decaying flesh it controlled when the arm abruptly shot out; its claw like hand suddenly hooking a set of blackened fingers about her calf.

‘Jesus!’ she gasped, surprised by the unexpected fierceness of the creature’s grasp. ‘Guess I was wrong,’ she continued, glancing briefly back at Brett and Kai before purposefully slamming the end of the crowbar deep into the cadaver’s skull, ruining the brain once and for all and truly granting the woman’s body a stillness that it had so far been denied.

Whether it was just her imagination, her mind playing tricks on her or just a simple case of projection, she didn’t know, but as the Dead woman’s hand released its hold on her and finally fell away, Fran could have sworn she saw a look of relief flash across the corpse’s decaying features.

‘
It wasn’t your fault
,’ said Fran silently, offering unspoken words of comfort to a mother who must’ve died knowing she would soon kill her own child, ‘
I’m sure
you tried to keep your baby safe... you were just unlucky… you weren’t to blame… you….’

But as the words flitted across Fran’s mind she couldn’t help but think of another mother and her child, another small family just trying to keep their baby safe out in the world, out among the Dead.

‘God, Sam, I hope you know what you’re doing,’ she muttered, imagining the flame haired young mother lying in place of the ruined corpse at her feet, ‘for Poppies sake, I hope you know.’

‘Fran… Fran, you okay?’ asked Kai, his voice snapping her from conjured scenes she hoped would never come to pass.

‘You zoned out for a bit there, Sweetheart,’ added Brett, his usual personality already starting to creep back in. ‘You want me to…’

‘No! No, I’ll do it,’ snapped Fran, surprising herself with the strength of her refusal. ‘I…I mean, I’ll do it, I’ll finish the job…’ she went on to say, dropping down to a crouch as she flashed the deceased mother one final glance, her words dropping to a whisper. ‘She deserves that much.’

And with that, she slid the hunting knife from the sheath on her ankle, briefly testing the weight of it in her hand, and then without further thought plunged it deep into the top of the Dead infant’s head.

‘So…’ she eventually sighed, wiping the gore from her blade on the Dead woman’s clothes; her worries for Poppy still hovering in the corners of her mind, like some unseen spectre. ‘Which way now?’

Brett had hardly opened his mouth to reply when the sound of bells ringing somewhere in the forest to their right gave her the answer.

‘Is it always like this?’ she went on to ask, pushing herself up from her knees with a grunt.

‘No… well, it didn’t used to be,’ replied Brett, looking back at her as he started to clamber over the moss covered remains of a fallen tree, ‘it’s been getting worse... especially over the last month or so… Seems to be more and more of the bastards wandering our way all the time… Fuck knows why… but there you go, what can you do about it? Fact of life now, I guess.’

‘You could f…find out w…why,’ suggested Kai, with a shrug of his shoulders, stating what he thought was an obvious answer.

‘You volunteering?’ snorted Brett. ‘Be my guest… but the main road running along this side of the park leads to a motor way… you seen the motorways recently, right? If you haven’t, fucking rush hour from hell, believe me.’

‘So you all just sit tight and hope for the best? Knocking them off one by one when they just happen to get too close,’ commented Fran, realising even if there had been a chance they could stay at White Oak Park it would have been pointless; the people here were doomed by their own complacency, doomed to fail and ultimately doomed to die.

‘Worked so far,’ shrugged Brett without looking back at her.

‘It’s a pity Mike didn’t stick around though,’ said Fran casually as she could, following Brett’s path over the fallen tree; her eyes glued to the young man’s back. ‘His screens would have really come in handy…’