Lanherne Chronicles (Book 3): Last Days With The Dead Read online

  ‘Well, what if we hadn’t noticed the ladders? Anyone could’ve got in,’ Patrick began, resting his heavy length of pipe against the wall. ‘You know there are people out there that would love to get in here. We’ve got it pretty good here and we can’t afford to take any risks that put us in danger, not with so many children here too.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Patrick,’ replied Gabe, images of what could have happened flashing through his mind.

  ‘For punishment, you can clean this for a start,’ said Patrick, tossing the stinking policeman’s vest to Gabe, ‘and then help Phil when he goes out to shift the bodies, and I’d better hear from Phil that you did the majority of the work, okay!’

  ‘Yes, Patrick,’ Gabe replied, holding the reeking vest at arm’s length away from him.

  ‘Wash what you can off it first, boil it, then ask Sister Rebecca for a jar of her Apple vinegar to disinfectant it and boil it again,’ Patrick said. ‘You’d better ask Avery if it should be boiled for a certain length of time to make sure.’

  ‘Yes, Patrick,’ said Gabe, ‘and sorry, it won’t happen again… promise.’

  ‘Make sure it doesn’t or we’ll have to think up something else to get the message into that thick head of yours,’ Patrick replied, the friendly smile slowly returning to his face. ‘Now get going, that thing stinks worse than you do.’

  ‘Yes, Patrick,’ Gabe said, returning the smile as he ran to the end of the walkway back to the ladder.

  Imran watched the young man sprint across the large courtyard and disappear inside the main building. When they had first come to Lanherne, the Sisters in residence had already gone a long way to converting much of the large area behind the high walls into a viable food producing compound. They had already had the stable where they housed the horses and goats, a chicken coop full of scrawny looking hens, some bee hives, and had turned most of the remaining land over to a patchwork of vegetable patches. Since then, a pig sty had also been built to accommodate the slowly growing herd, and Duncan, Lanherne’s resident engineer, had knocked through two of the small outbuildings to make one sizable building into a workshop for himself. They had also constructed a poly tunnel just outside the walls and a few of the surrounding overgrown fields had been ploughed for barley, wheat, and potato crops. Imran had been shocked how utterly back breaking the summer and winter harvests had been, but they had gathered a store of grain and potatoes and thanks to Duncan’s ingenuity, their bread had gone from a tough hard loaf to something a little more palatable.

  ‘Looks like Leon and Cam are back,’ Patrick said, breaking Imran from his thoughts, as he gestured to the box covered cart being pulled along the lane that led to Lanherne.

  ‘What? They’re back from the Penhaligan place already?’ said Imran, turning to look at the approaching cart. ‘They didn’t stick around…’

  Leon had been a troubled youth when the Dead first arrived. Gangs, soft drugs, and petty crime, had been his life, but that all changed the day he hurried home to find the body of his mother eating a neighbour. With his childhood friend, J-Man, he soon learnt his urban bravado and ‘fuck you’ attitude held no place in a world where death was just a hands grasp away. So as the world changed, Leon changed with it. He discovered he had a remarkable knack at throwing knives, and like Imran, his skill kept the Dead beyond arm’s reach for the survivors who had made their home at the Pylon.

  In contrast, Cam had been an ‘in the field’ reporter for the BBC, and as the world descended into chaos, there he had been sending reports of one massacre after another to horrified looking anchor men and women in the studio. But that was a lifetime ago now, and it had been almost two years since he had come across the small caravan of carts led by Charlie, an ex-soldier and the father of Alice’s baby, and eventually found its way to the Lanherne Convent and he gave thanks to God every day that he had.

  ‘Hope nothing’s wrong, ’Imran continued, moving to stand by the winch that would open the outer gate of the ‘holding’ area.

  Within ten minutes, the dappled mare was patiently standing just beyond the outer gate, her tail swishing back and forth, as she waited to be let in. Using the winch Duncan had developed; Imran turned the crank handle and watched the gate begin to open, while Patrick stood with a concerned expression on his face waiting for news from the two travellers.

  Cam and Leon had been sent to the old Penhaligan home to collect the spring harvest of vegetables and to prepare the ground for a second crop. The Penhaligan place was a large manor house, which the Penhaligan family had fortified to make their home. They had fallen foul of a religious cult almost a year ago and had been slaughtered, all apart from their youngest child, Alex, who had subsequently been adopted by the Lanherne croup. The house, with its orchard of fruit trees and large grounds turned over to food production, was too good a resource for those at the Convent to abandon. So it had been decided that until the house was taken over by some other group of survivors, they would routinely visit and take advantage of the bounty it had to offer.

  With it taking a good six or seven hours to get there and the same to get back, the trip should have taken three days, but with their unexpected early arrival something had obviously happened, and with the way the world was at the moment, Patrick knew it wasn’t going to be something good. Also, the fact that they had arrived back at Lanherne mid-morning meant they must have left before dawn and that worried him too. After the Dead had come to blight humanity, roads soon fell into disrepair and now many of them were little more than cracked and broken grey lines criss-crossing the countryside, and because of this, they didn’t tend to travel at night. All it took was one unseen pothole and a wheel could be damaged or worse, Delilah could hurt herself. With either option leaving them stranded with no means of safe transport, and with the only way back on foot through a terrain full of the Dead, it simply wasn’t worth the risk.

  Once Delilah had pulled the cart through the first set of gates and Imran had closed them behind her, a hatch popped open on the side of the box shaped cover of the cart.

  ‘Hey, Imran, my man,’ called Leon, as he appeared through the opening and waved up at the walkway, ‘how’s things here?’

  ‘Fine,’ Imran replied as he checked that none of the Dead had slipped into the holding area along with the cart, ‘Clear! Why are you back so early?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Leon called back, as he jumped down from the cart to check there wasn’t anything unexpected hanging on or caught underneath.

  When he was sure it was safe, he gave Imran the signal and the inner gate began to crank open. Walking alongside the cart, Leon led Delilah through the gates and into what was left of the courtyard. Immediately, Penny and Lars appeared from the stable to take care of Delilah, as Cam got out of the cart.

  Lars had been a geography teacher before the Dead came and Penny the remaining survivor of one of his classes. Having looked after her for eight years, Lars had taken on a grandfatherly role for the young woman who had spent much of that time trapped within her own traumatised mind. It had only been when Lars had been fighting for his life with one of the Dead that Penny had been able to pull herself back to reality and save him. Now she was the bright, inquisitive, beautiful woman she was always meant to be. But, by some strange twist of fate, Penny was not the only survivor from Lars’s school days, Steve who along with Avery had spent those years on the military base, was also a face from his past. Steve’s father had been a Sergeant on the base and when the world changed, the young boy had been taken to the island as part of the civilian entourage. Steve’s father had been a cruel and vicious soldier and when Steve ultimately betrayed him so he could spare Penny, his first love, from being sent to the island, his father had condemned him to a heartless death. It had only been thanks to Phil and the others from Lanherne that Steve had survived at all.

  ‘You’re back early.’ Penny said, giving Delilah’s muzzle a stroke.

  ‘Yeah, something came up,’ Leon casually said, while he turned to wa
tch Patrick make his way along the walkway to the ladder.

  ‘I was talking to Delilah, actually,’ Penny said, as she began to unbuckle the mare’s tack, ‘glad you got back too though.’

  ‘What? Sorry, Penny,’ Leon replied, ‘didn’t mean to sound rude, stuff on my mind, you know.’

  ‘No worries,’ she replied with a smile, handing Delilah’s reins over to Lars, ‘trouble?’

  ‘Not sure,’ he replied, scratching at the tight braiding that kept his hair beyond the grasp of Dead hands, ‘but something’s up for sure.’

  ‘Though ‘what’ is anyone’s guess,’ added Cam as he began to unload the cart of its cargo.

  ‘Is that all there is?’ asked Patrick, seeing the cart only held only a few sacks of vegetables.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Leon continued, turning his attention to Patrick who had moved next to him.

  With those words, Patrick knew bad news was on the cards, but as a horde of the Dead hadn’t been following the cart up the lane, he knew whatever it was, could wait a few minutes.

  ‘Well, William and Damien will be on watch duty in about five minutes, you and Cam meet me in the Refectory, okay?’ said Patrick, pushing aside the canvas glove to glance at the old battered watch on his wrist.

  ‘If you hurry, Sister Rebecca will cook you both some breakfast,’ called Lars over his shoulder, while he led Delilah over to the water trough.

  At the mention of food, a loud growl emanated from Leon’s stomach.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, his hand moving to cover his stomach, ‘guess I could do with something to eat.’

  ‘Right, see you in five minutes then,’ said Patrick, slapping Leon on the shoulder before turning to climb back up onto the walkway to do another circuit of the walls. ‘Oh, and welcome home you two.’

  ***

  In the Refectory, Liz sat at one of the long wooden tables with Saleana asleep in her arms, watching Nadine and Jen with the small group of children. Her sister, Anne, as one of the older members of the make shift school, was normally well behaved, but today, Nadine was teaching them mathematics and it was clear that Anne was bored by the subject, and had decided to play up. Justin on the other hand, who was a few years older than Anne, seemed to relish the order and simple truth that mathematics offered him, and had been able to master the subject at an alarming rate. Perhaps in the years to come, he would be able to put to good use his skill and even learn from Duncan the wonders of mechanics. They would surely need all the help they could get if they wanted a chance of rebuilding the world. But at the moment, his studious attitude was being disrupted by Anne, who was pulling faces at him.

  ‘Anne,’ Liz said sternly, hooking her finger back and forth, ‘come here.’

  ‘Now you’re for it,’ said Nadine, nodding for Anne to cross the room to her sister.

  With a ‘humph’ sound, Anne pushed herself away from the table and walked over to Liz.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ asked Liz sounding and acting more like Anne’s mother than her sister. ‘Do you want to be a dumbo all your life?’

  ‘But it’s boring,’ Anne whined. ‘Can’t I read instead, I like reading.’

  ‘What if we all only did what we liked, Anne,’ replied Liz, ‘the crops wouldn’t get harvested and the Dead wouldn’t get killed, and then where would we be?’

  ‘You like killing the Dead,’ Anne mumbled, absentmindedly kicking the leg of the table again and again.

  Anne had got her there. It was true; Liz did like killing the Dead. Well, not so much ‘liked’ but rather ‘needed’. She felt compelled to send these walking corpses back to the graves that had been denied them. She just knew it was her job to put down these creatures. They were simply wrong, their very existence at odds with nature and the way things should be. She felt this even more so now that she had given birth to a child. She refused to accept that her daughter was destined to live in a world where the Dead blossomed. Thanks to Avery’s anti-virus, the survivors at Lanherne may have miraculously been given the gift of true death, but to think of Saleana spending her whole life with the millions upon millions of walking corpses, tore at her heart.

  ‘Well,’ Anne continued, breaking Liz from her thoughts, ‘Can’t I read instead? P.l.e.e.e.a.s.e.’

  Looking into the large blue eyes peering out from an angelic upturned face, Liz smiled, lent forward, and took her sister’s chin in her hand.

  ‘No!’ she said flatly. ‘Get back to your work and get on with it, or you’ll be cleaning out the pigsty for a week, and I’m not joking.’

  Anne scrunched up her face, spun on her heals, and stomped back to her seat by Justin. With Anne now dealt with, Liz gently readjusted Saleana in her arms and looked over at the collection of found children that had been adopted by the survivors of Lanherne. There was Jimmy and Samantha, brother and sister, and just happy to be together, they were now both seven. There was Alex Penhaligan who had just turned six, and Bailey, who was also six. Then there was Danny. Poor trapped Danny, they could only guess his age and even the name they called him by, had been made up when he first arrived at the Convent. The poor child had survived such horrors before coming to them that Sister Rebecca had named him after the bible story of Daniel in the lion’s den. But the child had not come through the ordeal unscathed. Trapped in his own world, whether he was autistic or simply unable to find his way back from the horrors he had endured, they could not tell. But once in a while, he would recognise his name when they called it, or would suddenly pick up an object when offered. It was in those moments that there was hope, and with that hope, they knew someday, they would rescue the child that was imprisoned within his own mind.

  Liz watched, as Jen sat on the floor with Danny between her legs, trying unsuccessfully to engage the boy with the brightly coloured pictures of a book.

  ‘Oooh, look at the funny doggy, Danny,’ Jen said softly in the child’s ear, as she pointed to the picture of an orange cartoon dog. ‘You like doggies don’t you… you like Toby and Goldie, you remember them don’t you, Sweetie, eh…’

  Toby and Goldie were two more strays that had been taken in by the Convent. With dogs now running wild in packs, attacking the living and Dead alike, it somehow felt right to take in the two dogs that each in their own way had brought comfort to those in need. Goldie was an old Golden Retriever and had been with them for over a year now. It was when the cult had tricked their way into Lanherne to steal Anne that Liz had first encountered her, running wild and feeding on scraps of the Dead. Unlike the packs, Goldie was still able to remember Man as a friend, rather than a meal, and Liz had repaid such loyalty by giving her a home. In the death and sadness that was left in the wake of the cult’s departure, Goldie had been a comfort and a distraction for Justin while he waited for news of Anne. Toby on the other hand, had been a puppy when Jackson had found him in the woods. The happy little black bundle of fur had brought some joy to his otherwise lonely existence in the village school building, and when Jackson had finally taken his own life, Imran had brought the puppy back to Lanherne to keep Goldie company. The young pup and the old bitch had become fast friends, and were now quite inseparable. They would often be found draped over each, a mass of black and sandy coloured fur, sleeping peacefully in a warming pool of sunlight.

  As usual, Danny’s eyes slowly wandered about the room, settling only momentarily before moving on again. The one place that he seemed unable to focus his attention was the colourful page in front of him. Jen gently took one of his small hands in hers and stroked the back of it with her thumb. With a sigh, she turned to the page of the book. This time a brightly coloured row of ducks danced across the page.

  ‘Quack, quack,’ she said, pointing to the mother duck with her ducklings, ‘look, at the pretty ducks, Danny, all in a row… quack, quack, quack.’

  ‘Quack, quack,’ came a voice from the Refectory door.

  Looking up from the book, Jen couldn’t help but smile at the figure of Leon, as he stood leaning in the do
orway with his arms folded.

  ‘Hey, you,’ he said giving her a sly wink, ‘miss me?’

  ‘Sorry, and who are you again?’ she replied, her brow creasing questioningly.

  Leon nodded a ‘hello’ to Liz and Nadine, and then sauntered slowly into the room until he was stood behind Jen. Crouching down, he put his arms around her and pulled her close to his chest.

  ‘I’m the man you’re crazy about,’ he said as he kissed the back of her neck.

  ‘Oh, yes, now I think of it, your face does ring a bell,’ she replied, her hand leaving Danny’s to cup the side of Leon’s face behind her.

  ‘And how are you, Danny-boy?’ Leon said, reaching forward to ruffle Danny’s sandy blond hair. ‘You taking good care of my lady?’

  At the sound of Leon’s voice, Danny surprisingly turned his head to look back at the young mixed-race man who had spoken. For a split second, there was some kind of recognition behind his eyes, but as Danny’s gaze flitted across Leon’s face, it was lost again.

  ‘What was that about?’ Leon whispered to Jen.

  ‘Who knows,’ she replied, puzzled as much as Leon by Danny’s brief trip back to reality, ‘it could be something as simple as the tone of your voice. You know, reminding him of his father or something.’

  ‘Or perhaps you just like me, don’t you Danny-boy, eh,’ Leon continued, reaching forward again to pat the small boy on the head, ‘you and me are best buds, aren’t we?’

  But this time Danny gave no reaction to Leon’s touch, the boy was lost again.

  ‘Anyway, what are you doing back so early?’ Jen asked, turning her head to look back at Leon. ‘I thought you weren’t due back until tomorrow, and where’s Cam? Nothing’s happened to him I hope. ’

  ‘I was just about to ask the same,’ said Liz, walking over to the couple, Saleana resting peacefully on her shoulder.

  ‘Patrick and Imran are coming up in a minute, I’ll go through it all then,’ he replied, siting back on his ankles, ‘and Cam’s gone for a wash. I just wanted something to eat first.’