Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead (9 page)

‘Nice and slow’ she whispered, Kai’s sudden appearance beside her causing two of the magpies to noisily abandon the scaffolding in favour of a taller nearby tree.

As they slowly and silently approached the road block Fran couldn’t help but pause to glance into one of the rusting cars. With the driver’s door open, it’s window shattered and an old dark stain spread over the inside of the windscreen, it didn’t take a detective to guess what had happened here.

‘
One of the Dead!
’ she thought, looking at Kai who was nervously looking back over his shoulder to the safety of the waiting cart.

‘
Come on,
’ she gestured, with a flick of her head toward the broken barrier, smiling briefly to reassure him.

With broken glass crunching underfoot, Fran and Kai slowly crept onward; ever vigilant should one of the Dead appear from some unseen hiding place. As they walked Fran’s gaze briefly flitted over the remnants of a lost world scattered about the road before her. A rotting shoe, a pair of broken glasses, a cracked laptop, a collection of CDs, a dented open suitcase, its contents long since turned to a moulding mass by the rain; all of these things that had been so easily abandoned when their owner’s lives had been in peril. Dropped and left to rot like the forgotten shackles of a past life they were just pointless objects now; useless without the presence of Man to justify them.

Taking up her ‘guard’ position beside the scaffolding framework, Fran motioned to Kai that it was okay to go ahead and move the broken barrier to one side of the road. Watching only briefly as he picked up one end of the length of wood and began to drag it across the cracked tarmac, Fran turned and let her gaze wander over the road ahead of them.

‘
Where are you hiding?
’ she thought to herself, scanning the collection of rusting abandoned cars and vans in front of her for any sign of the Dead. ‘
There you are!
’ she continued, suddenly noticing two corpses fifty metres away slowly shuffling amongst the parked vehicles.

Too far to determine their sex, age or state of decay, Fran watched as one with its back to her unwittingly dragged itself on a collision course with the second cadaver. Knowing she was too far away for their milky eyes to notice her, she momentarily dismissed the two corpses in favour of something else that had piqued her interest; something with far more potential.

‘Done,’ whispered Kai, jogging back to her side before giving Tom a wave so that he knew the way ahead was now clear.

‘Hmmm… what, sorry?’ muttered Fran, lost in thought as she studied a particular section of overgrown hedgerow.

‘The road’s c…clear,’ he repeated, wondering just what had caught her attention.

‘Oh right… good, thanks,’ she replied, at last turning to look at him. ‘Kai, what do you see there?’ she continued nodding questioningly to an especially wild patch of foliage a little further down the road.

‘B…by the blue van? Erm…’ he pondered, finally shrugging his shoulders in reply.

‘Well,’ she began, turning her head to glance at Star and the cart that were just appearing behind them, ‘doesn’t it look like that part of the road is sort of set back from the rest, like there was originally a break in the hedgerow there or something?’

‘So?’ he asked, guessing he was clearly missing some vital clue.

‘So… if there was a break,’ she replied, signalling to Tom she had seen something she wanted to investigate, ‘then why are there bushes there now? Surely there’d just be the usual amount of encroachment… you know, just a metre or so of growth either side. They wouldn’t have met in the middle... not yet anyway,’ she continued, quickly returning her gaze to check on the progress of the two Dead figures further down the road.

‘Could it just be a l…layby?’ asked Kai.

‘Could be…’ she pondered thoughtfully, resting the weight of her crowbar against her shoulder.

‘Is this a W…woman’s intuition-Spidey-sense type thing?’ whispered Kai, at a loss to what it was about the patch of road that had her so intrigued.

‘Could be,’ she repeated, her lips twitching into a smile. ‘Well there’s only one way to find out… come on.’

And with that she darted forward, making sure to run in a crouch just in case her movement alerted the cadaver facing in their direction. The closer she got the more convinced she was that something was wrong with what she was seeing. Suddenly she realised she had been right about the break in the well-established fauna that ran along the sides of the road. For now that she was getting closer, she could see a narrow path ran along this side of the road and then as it approached the questionable section it abruptly curved, as if turning a corner.

‘
See, told you so!
’ she gestured to Kai, with a nod, a smile and waggle of her eyebrows.

Giving her a look that clearly said ‘smart-arse’ in reply, Kai secretly wondered if there may be some truth to woman’s intuition after all.

Ducking beside the blue van, Fran had to restrain herself while she waited for Kai to join her.

‘Look!’ she hissed, as he dropped down next to her. ‘What the fuck?

‘Oh!’ said Kai, clearly seeing what she was now talking about.

There, cleverly camouflaged and breaching a gap of five or six metres between the real ends of the hedgerows, was effectively a loosely woven wicker wall; a wall to which a huge amount of foliage, branches and plants had been attached. Whoever had constructed it, Fran had to give it to them, they certainly had an eye for detail. Not only had the greenery been artfully interwoven with the existing hedgerow on either side but they had even gone to the trouble of arranging clumps of grasses, wildflowers and weeds along the base; making it almost appear to be growing out onto the road. If the woven screen itself wasn’t curious enough, Fran found the glint of sheet glass behind it positively intriguing.

‘There’s something on the other side,’ she whispered, using the cover of the van to move closer and push aside a clump of dry leaves. ‘It’s glass,’ she continued, once she had made a gap large enough to wriggle her fingers through to touch it. ‘I… I think it’s a window.’

‘A window? To w…what?’ pondered Kai, forcing the branches wider apart for her; wincing at the sound of snapping of wood as he did so.

‘It’s okay,’ Fran reassured him, looking up over the bonnet of the van to the single cadaver that was still yet to notice their presence. ‘There’s only one... we’ve got a few minutes yet anyway.’

Once he had made the hole wide enough, Kai pushed his face against the small patch of exposed glass.

‘Well?’ asked Fran, on tenterhooks at just what secret they’d stumbled upon.

‘It’s…’ replied Kai, tilting his face to one side to get as much as a view along the side of the window as possible, ‘it’s a shop. A small village shop.’

‘A shop?’ Fran repeated, somewhat deflated by the reality of their find; that was until the true meaning of what Kai had said clicked in her mind. ‘A shop!’ she continued, her eyes suddenly sparkling with possibilities, ‘Please tell me the shelves are filled with tins of food… or you can at least see some detergent or soap or something.’

‘It’s a bit d…dark but…’ Kai began to say before Fran, unable to hold herself back, excitedly pushed him aside to take a look.

‘Oh… bum,’ she finally huffed, seeing for herself the rows of shelves inside; each with little more on them than a thick layer of dust. ‘Well, that’s a bit of a let-down,’ she continued, looking a little deflated as she turned her face away from the glass, ‘Guess it was a long shot that we’d found someone’s forgotten stash and that we’d…’

It was then that her words slowly faded until at last her lips finally came together in silence; a look of concentration spreading across her face as she looked back at the woven wall.

‘And?’ asked Kai, instantly recognising the look on her face.

‘And… and this is quite fresh,’ she thought aloud, reaching out to rub a leaf between her finger and thumb. ‘Which means someone else has been here to put fresh foliage on so that it still matches the two living ends.’

‘And w…why would they do that if there’s n…nothing inside,’ said Kai, finishing her train of thought.

‘Exactly,’ she agreed, a smile spreading across her lips.

For a moment she saw a look of apprehension cloud Kai’s features.

‘Look,’ she began, quickly checking once more on the progress of the wandering cadaver, ‘I get it. You think they found it first, it’s theirs.’

‘Fran,’ Kai started to protest, ‘we can’t just…’

‘No, no,’ she interrupted, knowing just what he was thinking. ‘Look, firstly who’s to say that whoever found this is even still alive… and if they are,’ she went on to say, her hands probing the wall as she moved to her left; searching for anything that looked like it may be the door, ‘well then we’ll leave something behind in exchange… some apples or some of the rabbit meat or something. We’re not some bastard Raiders taking what we want and fuck to those who get in our way.’

‘I know, I know,’ he replied, realising from her tone that he may have touched a nerve. ‘B…but if this is someone’s home,’ he continued, reaching out to gently take her arm, ‘I don’t think they’ll ap…appreciate you ripping down their wall to get in, do you?’

Fran looked at Kai, her hand frozen mid-movement.

‘Hmm, I guess you’re right,’ she reluctantly agreed, looking thoughtfully back and forth along the cleverly constructed camouflage. ‘And anyway,’ she added, finally breaking cover from behind the van to move to the far end of the wall where it became interwoven with the real hedgerow, ‘If someone does live here they’re clearly not going in this way. There must be another way in, a side entrance or round the back or something.’

‘Fran!’ hissed Kai, noticing that the approaching corpse had finally got close enough to become aware of their presence and was even now slowly changing his course to greet them; its arms held out in anticipation of the bloody embrace to come. ‘Company!’

On alert, she instantly zeroed in on the advancing cadaver. Slowly rising, she instinctively broke the oncoming encounter down into its key moments of possible danger.

‘Stay here,’ she said, holding Kai back with a single wave of her hand. ‘I need to stop this one quickly before he starts moaning and lets every other stinking corpse in the area know we’re here.’

Knowing Kai would follow her instructions without question, Fran strode purposefully forward without looking back; her grip tightening about the crowbar in her hand.

Now that the cadaver had got close enough, Fran could see it had in fact once been a late-middle aged woman. Dressed in maroon trousers, the hems tattered and clogged with filth, and a darkly stained checked tabard worn over a grimy blouse, Fran thought the Dead woman looked like a bazaar Dinner lady from some hellish canteen.

‘
What’s for dinner, Miss?
’ she found herself thinking as she darted round the wreck of a car to meet her corpse head on, ‘
Why,
you are, dearie!
’ she imagined the creature croaking in nightmare-ish reply.

That was at least one mercy humanity had been spared, the Dead could not speak; they had no conscious thought processes, acting solely on the most primitive of instincts. To hear them pleading for a taste of your flesh, hopeful to quench the unending hunger that burned within them, now that would be too much for anyone to bear.

‘Not today, I’m not,’ Fran muttered aloud, as she boldly stepped up to the Dead woman; the corpse seeming to almost shake with excitement at the nearness of Fran’s living flesh.

Ignoring the look of intense need on the Dead woman’s sallow and mould covered features, Fran quickly placed her feet slightly apart to brace herself and then let her crowbar swing. With a resonating ‘crack’, the corpse’s head was snapped sharply to the left by the power of her blow; a deep disfiguring dent appearing over the right side of her temple.

‘Shit!’ spat Fran, angry that her first strike hadn’t been enough to finish the creature.

With the Dead woman stumbling slightly from the impact, Fran took another swing; making sure to aim at the centre of the forehead. Unlike her initial attack, this time as the crowbar hit home Fran could feel the front of the corpse’s skull collapse under the pressure exerted upon it. For a split second the Dead woman’s body stood motionless, almost as if held upright by the very presence of Fran’s crowbar lodged in its brain, but then with a sucking sound the body freed itself from the metal and at last fell to the ground. With the job done Fran was just about to turn away from the lifeless pile of rotting flesh when something glinting on the side of the corpse’s temple caught her eye and made her smile.

‘I knew it wasn’t me,’ she mumbled, realising what she was seeing was the true failure of her first strike; for there, exposed by a flap of torn scalp, was a badly dented metal plate in the side of the woman’s head.

With the belief in her own abilities once again bolstered, Fran jogged back to where Kai was waiting for her.

‘P…problem?’ he asked, glancing behind to the crumpled pile of limbs.

‘No, everything’s just as it should be,’ she replied, with a wink. ‘Come on, let’s find that way in.’

***

As it turned out, once they had pushed their way through a relatively sparse section of the hedgerow further down the road and doubled back to the single story building, they almost immediately found a broken window near the cashier’s desk that had been hastily covered with a sheet of plywood.