Lanherne Chronicles (Book 2): Five More Days With The Dead Read online

  ‘Foetus is a little smaller than we’d expect in the third trimester,’ the female doctor said aloud, looking over at a small screen to Alice’s left, ‘but that can be put down to mother’s borderline malnutrition. I’m getting a steady heart beat though and there are no obvious abnormalities present with regards to physical development.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Dr Morris said, absentmindedly pushing his glasses up onto his forehead to look at the screen.

  The Med-lab looked to all intents and purposes like a cross between a science lab and a medically refitted, but heavily armoured caravan. The only windows were long, thin and set high along one wall, near the ceiling. Everything seemed to gleam with a cleanliness that seemed alien to Alice after all these years. Above her, tubes lightly bathed the room in a harsh light and the constant high-pitched buzz they produced seemed to exist just outside her hearing range. At one time, it wouldn’t even have registered to Alice, but now the light and sound only came across as something cold and unnatural. Along one wall, were a row of four beds, and next to each, various monitors and electrical gizmos had been built into the wall. To monitor what, Alice could only guess.

  Alice lay without moving while the Dr Chambers swept the ultrasound reader back and forth over her stomach, electronically seeing her baby hidden within. The woman, who looked to be in her early fifties, appeared to be well fed. Unlike Alice and everyone else at Lanherne, her face had a round quality to it. Not that she was fat by any stretch of the word, more that her face had none of angular feel that came from living one meal away from starvation. Apart from Dr Morris and the woman, there was also one other Doctor with her in the Med-lab and he seemed to keep himself busy darting between checking her blood under a microscope and inputting data from various machines into a computer. Well, Alice assumed he was a doctor. It was not as if he or the other two were dressed in the traditional white coats to indicate their profession. Like the solders, they wore camouflage army fatigues with a bulletproof vest over the top. The only nod to any form of medical identification on any of them was a small embroidered ‘medic’ patch sewn onto one sleeve.

  ‘Placenta looks healthy and the amniotic fluid appears to be decreasing at an appropriate rate,’ Chambers continued, looking back at Dr Morris, ‘As good a candidate as we’re going to find, Dr Morris.’

  ‘Well, I’ll discuss the matter with Dr Farrell when the next satellite window comes round,’ he replied, moving forward to peer intently at the monitor image

  As much as she hated to ask anything of the doctors, Alice was tantalised by the flickering reflections of light she could see bouncing off Dr Morris’s glasses.

  ‘Can… can I see my baby?’ Alice asked, berating her herself for the emotion creeping into her voice, making it quiver.

  Alice looked from one face to the next. The look of mild surprise that briefly flitted across the faces of all three doctors in the room was almost comical. Their attention had been so focused on the ultrasound monitor that it was as if they had forgotten that she was actually there at all. Dr Chambers’ eyes flicked from Alice to the Dr Morris, waiting for his approval.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied after a pause, slowly pivoting the monitor towards Alice.

  Alice stared in wonder at the dancing pixels in front of her. The overwhelming emotion that seemed to flood into her was alien and indescribable to Alice. An all-encompassing love seemed to bloom suddenly within her, pushing itself to the very limits of her physical form. In that instant, she knew that she would love, or rather, she already loved this chid with every atom of her being. This child would be her world, totally. Without conscious thought, her hand moved towards the image of her developing child.

  ‘That’s his head there,’ the female doctor said, tracing a section of the screen, ‘and that’s his heart…’

  ‘His?’ Alice whispered, her fingers delicately meeting the screen, ‘I’m having a boy?’

  ‘Yes, a boy,’ said Dr Morris, ‘but now you should rest.’

  Standing, he abruptly repositioned the monitor, leaving Alice’s hand mournfully hovering in space.

  As Alice’s hand slowly fell back to rest on her belly, something that had been said nagged at the back of her mind. Something made her feel both protective and uneasy at the same time.

  ‘Candidate for what?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry?’ Dr Morris replied, slipping his glasses back down onto the bridge of his nose as he looked at a printed tape coming from one of the machines.

  ‘She said my son was a good candidate,’ Alice continued. ‘Candidate for what, exactly?’

  Dr Morris shot his colleague a quick harsh look before taking a deep breath.

  ‘Alice, your child could be…could be the saviour of Mankind,’ he began, a serious look on his face. ‘Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean in the form of a religious Messiah but rather his very existence at this moment in time could be just what we’ve been looking for to end all this… this madness.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alice asked, pushing herself up on one elbow.

  ‘Erm… where to begin…’ he continued, removing his glasses, folding them and using them to tap against his chin, ‘well, after a lot of trial and error, we’ve finally isolated the virus responsible for the Death-walker plague. Put simply, it’s a manmade air-born pathogen, deceptively simple in its structure but with a highly complex DNA structure. Whoever manufactured the original viral components certainly did some heavy-duty gene manipulation to make sure it was going to be virtually impossible to pin down. For some reason, known only to its maker, its protective coat of protein molecules mutate as it reproduces but only after it is host bound. This makes it appear quite alien in appearance to its original air-born form. That’s why it took so us long, you see. Each time we thought we had it licked, it would up and change again. What the original objective of the virus was, we’ll never know, but I’m guessing they hadn’t counted on it being partial to burying itself deeply in the synaptic junctions of nerve tissue. Even less likely that it liked to keep them firing even after the host had expired. Anyway, Alice, with each breath we take, we continually infect ourselves. There’s not a soul on the plant who doesn’t already have the Death-walker buried deep in their nervous system, waiting to take over its host.’

  ‘I still don’t understand, Doctor, sorry,’ Alice said, not knowing where this was going.

  ‘Well, we’ve finally managed to develop our own host based antivirus which contains a specific protein inhibitor gene. Our virus also congregates at these same synaptic junctions and when it comes into contact with the Death-walker virus, it locks its current mutation in place and then uses this as a template to actively seek out and destroy the original invading virus. The major drawback being that to test it, it needs to be introduced to a host uninfected by the Death-walker virus. If we can do this and everything works as we think it should, we can then use the subsequent generations of our antivirus to produce a vaccine or even better an air born version and combat it globally rather than patient by patient.’

  The realisation suddenly began to dawn on Alice. She knew the way this conversation was going and she didn’t like it one bit.

  ‘And let me guess,’ she said, ‘this uninfected host you want to test this theory on… is my baby?’

  ‘It’s perfectly safe, I assure you,’ Dr Morris butted in.

  ‘But surely if I’m infected, my baby is too?’ She continued, ignoring the doctor’s assurances.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Like with HIV, the foetus would carry your antibodies, yes, but may not actually be infected itself.’

  ‘No, I’m not going to allow you to experiment on my baby,’ Alice said, feeling her maternal panic rising. ‘You have no idea what this new virus could do to him… not really. It’s all been in theory so far, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I think you misunderstand me,’ said Dr Morris, shaking his head wearily.

  ‘Oh, I understand you alright and the answer is, no!’ Alice shouted,
as she began to push herself up from the bed.

  ‘No, Alice,’ he continued, ‘what I mean is that you seem to be under the misapprehension that we’re asking your permission.’

  It was only then that Alice noticed that Dr Chambers had moved around her and was drawing a clear liquid from a small vial into a hypodermic.

  ‘You get that thing the fuck away from me!’ she shouted, trying to push at Dr Morris as he gripped her shoulders tightly. For a small man, he was surprisingly strong.

  ‘Now, Alice, there’s no point in struggling. You’ll only cause yourself an injury,’ he said, trying to push her back down onto the bed.

  ‘No!’ she screamed and with a strength born of pure maternal fear, she managed to wrench one of her arms free long enough to slam her palm into Dr Morris’ nose.

  With a yelp, he immediately let go of her, his hands automatically rising to his face to staunch the blood flowing freely from his nose. However, from the stabbing sharp pain that was in her other arm, Alice already knew it was too late.

  ‘No, please,’ she said softly, turning to the woman withdrawing the needle.

  If she had hoped to find anything maternal or compassionate in the woman’s face, Alice was to be sorely disappointed. The woman stared blankly at Alice for a few seconds.

  ‘It’s just something to calm you down,’ she said matter-of-factly, replacing the plastic cap over the needle.

  Then, as if Alice was nothing but a test subject, her humanity suddenly ignored, she reached out to Alice’s face. With her surgical glove covered fingers, the doctor then pulled up one of Alice’s eyelids, wanting to observe her pupil dilation as the anaesthetic took effect.

  ‘Please,’ Alice said, trying to pull her face away from the woman’s grasp. Already a heavy feeling seemed to be smothering her arms and legs. ‘Please, my baby… please.’

  With each breath, a blooming darkness crept across her whole body, threatening to pull her down into a dreamless oblivion.

  ‘Her malnourished state seems to have speeded up the reaction time to the Propofol. It’s to be expected though,’ Dr Chambers said to Dr Morris, as she observed Alice’s pointless fight against the drug to stay conscious. ‘She’ll be out any second.’

  With the darkness quickly closing in on her, Alice could fight no more. Three spoken words drifted to Alice through the fog of her mind, demanding attention, but before the last word faded from thought, she was unconscious, their meaning lost to her.

  ‘Strap her down,’ said Dr Morris.

  ***

  ‘I thought the Lanherne group kept on top of the Dead?’ Leon whispered, turning from the spy hole. ‘We seem to be running into a lot more than I expected.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Patrick replied over his shoulder. ‘Phil said they usually just had to deal with a dozen or so a day, but we’re only just reaching the village and we’ve killed three times that many at least. I don’t like it.’

  It had taken longer than expected for the two carts with their heavy loads of livestock and survivors to make it as far as St Mawgan village. The snowfall hadn’t helped with their progress. More than once, one of the carts had lurched alarmingly to one side as a wheel sank deep into an unseen pothole. Thankfully, they had been travelling at a slow enough pace that the sudden jolt hadn’t caused the wheels any damage. To try to repair them on the road would have been a Herculean task at the best of times, never mind the freezing wind and intermittent snowfall that they had to deal with at the moment. It was when they began to pass the first of the dilapidated cottages on the outskirts of the village that they encountered their first large group of the Dead. Phil had made it clear before they left the Penhaligan home that even though it would slow them down, they would deal with any of the Dead they came across rather than simply leaving them to wander. It had been one of Charlie’s rules and Lanherne had abided by it religiously, even though he was no longer with them. You never knew when a problem would proverbially come back to bite you on the arse, so to deal with the Dead when they were still a manageable number, just made common sense. You waited too long to cull them and you could find yourself quickly overrun.

  ‘But what’s attracting them?’ Helen quietly said, nervously pulling a sleeping Jasmine closer to her. ‘From what Phil said, this certainly isn’t the norm for around here, so something’s got them riled up, big time.’

  Ahead of them, Delilah pulled the Lanherne cart to a stop. As he watched, a group of more than a dozen Dead in various states of decay milled aimlessly about them, blocking the narrow country lane in the process. Patrick pulled Shadow to a halt, waiting for a sign from Imran.

  ‘Come on,’ Patrick said to himself under his breath, urging Imran into action.

  On either side of their cart, the Dead stumbled past them. Patrick worried the crush of the Dead might make Shadow bolt if their numbers increased much more. Already the usually steady mare rocked her head back and forth, uncomfortable in the presence of so much Dead flesh. Then a decrepitly decayed woman, her mouldy skin puckering where shards of broken glass had been embedded deeply in her rotting flesh, stumbled and lost her footing. She fell from sight alongside Shadow’s flank. As she went down, one of the pieces of glass in her shoulder brushed sharply against the mare’s skin, startling her. With a start, Shadow made her displeasure evident and strained against her harness, jolting the cart behind her and those within it violently. With this sudden movement, Jasmine was shaken awake. As expected with an infant brought abruptly from a comfortable nap, Jasmine began to scream in the loud high-pitched tone that only a startled baby could produce. Immediately, the constant rustle of Dead footsteps ceased. One by one, Dead eyes turned towards the cart that up until that moment had held no more interest in them than a rock or tree.

  ‘Shit!’ Patrick said, turning to look at Helen, their screaming daughter in her arms.

  Then the pounding started. First, one withered fist slammed hard against cart’s wooden cover and then another and another. Soon there was a constant drumming and scraping of fists and fingers, desperate to get to the living flesh now known to be hidden from view. Realising that the cart wouldn’t be able to withstand this continual onslaught forever, Patrick was relieved when, through the front view slit, he saw the roof hatch of the Lanherne cart open and Imran appeared, already pulling back the string of his bow.

  ‘Leon, J-Man,’ Patrick said, ‘Get some of these Dead bastards off us before they smash their way in.’

  ‘On it,’ Leon replied, while pulling two of his throwing knives free as J-man flipped open the roof hatch.

  Steadying himself on the roof, J-man pulled Leon up. After a little too much creaking for comfort from the wooden panels that made up the roof, the two edged themselves over to look down on the attacking Dead.

  ‘Here,’ Sarah called from the hatch, handing J-man a long club with wicked looking spikes driven through its end.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied, taking it from her.

  In the time it took to retrieve the weapon, two of the Dead had already fallen to Leon’s knives and he was smoothly pulling another two blades from their sheath covers. As J-man cautiously moved back to the edge of the cart’s roof, he noticed beneath the moans and sounds of Dead clambering hands on the side of the cart, the unmistakable low thud of sharp points rupturing skulls. As if to prove his assumption correct, an arrow suddenly appeared in the temple of a Dead woman below him. Instantly, her jaw went slack as her head was snapped to one side by the force of the impact. If it hadn’t been for the press of her Dead brethren about her, she surely would have slumped to the ground, her animated corpse once more claimed by death.

  ‘Right,’ said J-man to himself, quickly picking a target from the Dead throng.

  A bloated grey corpse, utterly sexless in its advanced decayed state, soon noticed the living flesh of J-man, hovering above it just beyond its grasp. Reaching up, arms sagging under the weight of its maggot-ridden skin, the creature fixed its gaze upon the flesh it knew would somehow quench thi
s burning need that consumed it.

  ‘Not today, Fatso,’ J-man said, ramming the club down forcefully onto the top of its hairless baldhead.

  With a crack, the spikes ripped through the mottled skin, cracking the skull plates and rupturing the rancid cranial tissue. Grunting with effort, J-man yanked free his spiked club, pulling away shards of broken skull and brain matter in the process. Ignoring the fate of this creature, J-man swiftly moved his attention to the next cadaver, his club falling again to end an unnatural existence. One by one, the Dead began to fall beneath an onslaught of blows from J-man’s club, Leon’s knives and Imran’s deadly flying arrows.

  ‘I’m out of knives!’ called Leon, five minutes later as he stepped away from the edge of the cart.

  ‘It’s alright, man, Imran’s just got the last two,’ J-man said, as the final animated corpses fell to the road, finally motionless forever.

  ‘Jesus, where did they all come from?’ Leon asked, wiping his sweating forehead with the back of his sleeve. ‘God, I hope it’s clear from here on in. I’m knackered already.’

  ‘Beats me,’ J-man replied, before jumping down from the roof to check on Shadow.

  With the Dead now dealt with, Patrick clambered out of the cart, stepping over the rotting corpses surrounding them to join J-man by Shadow.

  ‘Is she alright?’ he asked, worried the mare might have received a serious cut from the glass.

  ‘Looks like just a scrape to me,’ J-man replied, gently examining the long but shallow wound on shadows flank. ‘I think she was more spooked than anything. I’ll wash it out with some garlic water for now and get Gabe to see to her properly when we get to Lanherne.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Patrick, with a nod, knowing the antiseptic qualities of the garlic water would help prevent any infection setting in.