Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead Read online

  ‘Don’t worry, Mike,’ Fran softly muttered to the now motionless corpse, her eyes drifting unhappily to Dead woman still struggling behind it, ‘she’ll be along soon enough.’

  And with those words, Fran reluctantly repeated the process, allowing the hook to fall once more; finally ending an unnatural existence and at last giving the woman’s body the eternal peace it deserved.

  ‘What a fucking mess,’ she thought to herself, rubbing her throbbing temples as she looked at the two lifeless corpses in front of her. ‘But I’m going to make that bitch pay for this… I swear to you both… she’ll pay,’ she went on to whisper, making her promise not only to the young couple whose lives had been so pointlessly cut short but also to herself.

  Knowing that she had done all that could be done for Sam and Mike, Fran began to make her way back through the long dark room; weaving her way through the warren of shelves in search of a way out. With each cloaked nook and recess she passed, she would tentatively probe it, hopeful for a doorway or window that may offer escape but each time she was met with yet more shelves or simply a grimy soot covered blank wall.

  ‘Right… so nothing helpful back there,’ she muttered, when she finally returned to the spot where she had initially regained consciousness, glancing once more up at the narrow windows; the small cleaned patch still her only light source to go by. ‘I guess that leaves me with one direction to…’ she started to mumble just as she was abruptly plunged into total darkness. ‘What the…’ she said aloud, the dim moonlight suddenly returning again just as quickly as it had vanished. ‘Oh, must’ve got cloudy out there,’ she realised, feeling rather foolish that she had been so startled by clouds merely crossing the moon.

  Knowing, thanks to Wendy and Angela’s departure, that there was at least one door somewhere in the dark shadows ahead of her, Fran slowly continued her way past more blackened shelves laden with smoked meat; all the while the meagre moonlight behind her becoming fainter and fainter with each step. She was just passing a deeply shaded shelf that from the silhouette seemed to have the body of a headless dog or fox on it, when she noticed very large shape hanging from the ceiling a few steps ahead of her; a shape that in the darkness was little more than a block of darker shadow blocking her path.

  ‘The deer,’ she thought, remembering the large animal carcass she had seen earlier; her hand automatically reaching out to push the animal aside as she stepped forward.

  Yet as she closed the gap, her fingertips just shy of brushing against the hanging object, she paused; a sense of dread suddenly blooming within her. For something was different here, something very wrong, something that smelled of…

  ‘Blood!’ she gasped, her single spoken word causing the dark shadow in front of her to violently jerk and twist. ‘Jesus!’ she cried, throwing herself backwards; noisily colliding with the shelf behind her and sending its contents tumbling across the floor.

  For a moment Fran simply stood there, motionless, watching as the dark shadow thrashed and twisted mid-air; momentarily disappearing from sight only to reappear again as another cloud drifted across the moon. And then as if a switch had been flicked in her brain, she was moving again.

  ‘Light! I… I need more light!’ scrambled Fran, pushing herself away from the shelves to stumble back towards the table, crashing into things as she went. ‘More light… I… I need to see... I need to see,’ she continued, hurriedly clambering up onto the table, her growing dread forcing her to gulp down ragged painful gasps. ‘I need to see… please, I need to see… God… please… no… I… I need to see!’ she started to sob as she frantically moved her hands across the sooty glass, letting just that bit more light in with each passing. Suddenly she stopped moving, her eyes locked on her blackened hands shaking against the near-clear glass in front of her and in that instant she knew whatever she saw when she turned would change her; would change her world forever.

  ‘Please…’ she whispered once more to the heavens as she began to turn, her plea broken by the sob catching in her throat.

  And then in an instant her world was torn apart.

  ‘No!’ she cried, collapsing to her knees, shaking her head in hopeless denial as the moonlight spilled across a blood covered T-shirt; a T-shirt emblazoned with a Batman logo.

  ‘My favourite,’ a man’s voice, ghost like and distant, flitted across her mind; bubbling up from a memory.

  ‘No… please, no…God, please!’ she wept, her shaking fingers clamping across her lips as if to restrain the terrible madness that threatened to erupt from her. ‘Kai! No, Kai! Please, No!’

  And then with a heart wrenching cry, she let the madness claim her.

  ***

  Fran didn’t know how long she lay curled in a ball, cradling Kai’s body in her lap; his blood cold and slick beneath her. In fact she only barely remembered clawing her way back across the room, weeping uncontrollably as a pain, up until then unimaginable, tore through her chest and flayed her soul bare. She saw flashes of herself distraught on her knees before him, desperate to free him of the torment that death had forced upon his body, yet at the same time unable to bring herself to accept the nightmare before her as real. For to act was to accept this loss; to acknowledge that Kai had been taken from her forever and to ultimately admit that she was now truly alone. Yet act she did, such was her love for this young man who had come into her life and even as she later held him lovingly on the cold floor she saw herself, as if watching from afar, plunging the hook deep into the base of his skull to free him. Over and over again the memory repeated itself as she wept, her tears washing the rivulets of blood from his pale face, until finally every detail of the act had been branded into her very being.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Kai… please… please don’t go,’ she begged, her words tearful whispers as she gently brushed her fingers down his cheek; holding his body close, desperate to feel him embrace her back just one more time, ‘please… I … I need you, Kai,’ she continued, kissing his forehead as more of her heavy tears fell. ‘We… we were going to beat this, we promised... you and me, we would see this through...’ she whispered, moving a stray lock of his dark hair out of his face. ‘See the end of them… the end of the Dead… we were going to see life go back to normal… we promised… you and me, together… you promised… you and me… we would see the end of them…’

  Yet even as the words bubbled forth she knew their promises had been but a pipe dream; mere wishful words of the lost as they dreamed for a better tomorrow. But now they would never know what could have been. For that tomorrow and all the tomorrows they could have had together had been stolen from them; all those possibilities and futures forever gone with the slash of a blade and the parting of skin. All those hopes, dreams, loves, kisses, smiles, tears, conversations and arguments, make-ups and nights held in each other’s arms, they were all no more; snuffed out like the extinguishing of a candle, plunging her into a darkness from which she saw no escape.

  But then in the dark abyss that was her grief, a spark flared; so brief at first she almost missed it. Yet it flared again and then again; crying out to her across the sea of her loss and pain, reaching for her, nameless and indistinct. And then, before she knew what was happening, she found her own mind answering this call, clawing its way past her sorrow and grief; desperate to fill the void that Kai’s death had left within her. Slowly at first and then with increasing urgency she reached out for the spark, even as it too reached out for her in its own unfathomable way; and then as they met a warmth and a rage born of a burning sun spread throughout her. And with it came knowledge, for she now knew the spark, its form, it name and measure; for it was revenge and she would command it totally.

  ‘They knew… they all knew…’ she later croaked, her voice harsh and raw from crying, as she took Kai’s cold hand in hers, holding it against her cheek ‘All of them… they knew what would happen… from the moment we stepped off that barge, they knew,’ she continued, softly kissing his blood stained fingers as she looked i
nto his pale lifeless face. ‘Not one of them will go un-punished… I swear…not one of them… They… they have so much blood on their hands… so much,’ she added, realising they were surely not the first to fall foul of those at White Oak Park. ‘But it stops now… no more… never again.’

  Lapsing into a numb silence, Fran simply looked at Kai, her eyes searching his face, burning every aspect of him into her memory; for she knew she would soon have to leave him if she was to make good on her promise to both him and Sam and Mike. It was a promise that she had made gladly to her lost friends and a promise that she swore to her lost love; it was a promise that demanded blood and with her rage she was the blade that would draw it from the guilty.

  ‘I… I’m sorry, Kai, I… ’ she finally whispered, lowering her head to rest against his chest, his cold fingers still entwined in hers. ‘He’s really gone,’ she suddenly thought to herself, the shock of the silence that met her ear making the nightmare all that more real and final. ‘Kai, I’ve got to go… I’ve got to leave you now,’ she continued, kissing the back of his hand as fresh heavy tears bloomed in her eyes, ‘I’ve got to find a way out of here so I can stop them… I don’t want to leave but you know I must… I… I love you so much… I just wish… I... I truly love you…I’m sorry, Kai… I’m just so sorry.’

  And with that, she let his cold hand slip from hers, gently positioned it upon his chest and then, before her churning grief could swallow her whole again, she slowly and with great care eased Kai off her lap.

  ‘I’ll… I’ll never forget you,’ she said, shakily wiping away her tears before wearily pushing herself up from her knees; finally ready to continue her search of the room. ‘I… I can do this,’ she thought to herself, sparing Kai’s lifeless body one last sorrowful glance before stepping past him to check out the rest of the room. ‘I have to.’

  Unfortunately the far end of the room seemed to be much like the rest, shelves, animal meat, piles of chopped wood and a thin layer of soot that seemed to be everywhere; that was until she found the door. Made of wood and clearly bolted from the outside, the door was covered in a thick almost tacky film of grime and if she wanted to get through it any time soon Fran knew she was going to have to come up with something a little more effective than hacking away at it with a hook for the next hour or so. She was just building up the courage to double back and recheck the room just in case she had missed something when she noticed, deep in the shadows to her right, a small metal filing cabinet partly hidden under what looked to be a folded tarpaulin.

  ‘Hmmm, maybe…’ she muttered, hoping that if she couldn’t find a way out of the smoke house she may at least find a better weapon for when they did eventually come for her. ‘With all this meat there has to be a knife in this room somewhere,’ she thought to herself, pushing aside the tarpaulin to jiggle and pull the small cabinet out of the shadows and further into the moonlit room. ‘Perhaps…’ she continued, pulling open the top drawer, hopeful to find something of use.

  Finding nothing really of use apart from a smaller version of one of the hooks she already had, Fran moved onto the next drawer down.

  ‘Ah,’ she exclaimed, finding a child’s pale blue plastic lunch box inside, the cartoon white haired girl stood beside a smiling snowman nothing more than a distant memory to her.

  Plucking it from the drawer, Fran was pleased to hear the reassuring rattle of something sliding back and forth inside it.

  ‘Oh… damn,’ she sighed, opening the box to find only a unlabelled glass bottle containing a clear liquid and an old disposable lighter. ‘Now what?’ she muttered, crossly tossing the lighter back into the lunchbox.

  As the lighter bounced off the plastic rim and clattered to the soot covered floor by her feet, Fran glared at it angrily.

  ‘Why couldn’t you be a knife,’ she mumbled, wearily bending down to retrieve it.

  Wondering what she should do now, Fran’s thumb idly brushed against the lighter’s flint wheel, sparking a small flame briefly into life.

  ‘Idiot!’ she suddenly berated, a bitter smile twitching at her lips as the small blue flame suddenly popped out of existence again. ‘I’m in a smokehouse…’ she continued, reaching for the bottle she had found in the lunch box, ‘and what do you expect to find in a box with a lighter…’ she said, pausing as her fingers fumbled to unscrew its cap. ‘Yes!’ she exclaimed triumphantly, the sharp smell of white spirit hitting her nostrils. ‘A way out!’

  Knowing if ever a desperate time called for desperate measures, that this was it, Fran began to flick the meagre contents of the bottle across the wooden door blocking her escape.

  ‘Right, here goes nothing,’ she mumbled, thumbing the lighter as she held it gingerly against the spirit-splashed wood.

  No sooner had her thumb started to turn the small flint wheel, than with a single spark a wave of blue light leapt across the surface of the door, instantly igniting the alcohol with a soft ‘whoop’.

  ‘Come on… burn… burn…’ she willed, watching as the blue flame suddenly flared in places, changing to the welcome flicker of gold; telling her the fire now consumed the wood beneath.

  Standing there for a few minutes, the heat from the spreading fire already pricking at her skin, Fran briefly wondered if she’d just made a terrible mistake.

  ‘Too late now,’ she coughed, backing away as the flames grew in intensity, already licking at the top of the door frame; the smoke boiling and rolling up towards the ceiling. ‘Yep… way too late,’ she repeated, grabbing the folded tarpaulin as she backed further into the room.

  Dropping to a crouch by one of the old blackened shopping trollies, Fran quickly unfolded the tarpaulin and placed it over her head; all the while watching the worrying progress of the rapidly growing blaze.

  ‘Shit, what have I done?’ she thought, coughing as acrid smoke began to spread across the ceiling and drop down to fill the room; forcing her to duck even closer to the floor in the hope of finding clearer air.

  But this was a waiting game and she knew it; a game of ‘chicken’ with her life as the prize. Fran knew she had to hold her nerve; too soon and it would have all been for nothing, too late and at best she would simply suffocate from smoke inhalation.

  ‘Not yet… not yet…’ she told herself, coughing as she peeked out from under the tarpaulin at the raging fire that now engulfed the door and ceiling, the noise of the blaze startlingly loud. ‘Wait… just a bit longer… not yet… not yet…just a bit more… just…’

  And then before she was aware of her own actions, something snapped in Fran’s mind, something instinctive, wild and primeval; and with it she found herself moving. Jumping to her feet, she grabbed hold of the trolley handle and with a tug on the tarpaulin so that it covered her completely she charged as fast as she could towards the door, hunched over, pushing the trolley before her.

  ‘Please!’ she silently begged as she felt the front of the trolley slam into the burning door.

  For a split second she feared she had just consigned herself to a terrible and fiery death but then with the splintering of burning wood and a blast of colder air rushing forward to greet her, the front of the metal trolley broke through.

  ‘Yes!’ she hissed from under the tarpaulin, her momentum sending her and the trolley crashing through the disintegrating door, just as a burning panel broke free and hit her hard on the shoulder. ‘Ouch!’ she cried in surprise as the unseen burning wood slammed against her before being knocked aside.

  But the momentary pain of the blow was a small price to pay for her escape and as Fran felt the traction under the wheels change from the bare concrete of the smoke house to the smooth tiled floor of the Dome, she knew she would gladly pay this price over and over again if it meant she could settle some scores with the residents of White Oak Park.

  Skidding to a stop a few metres from what was left of the burning door, Fran threw the tarpaulin away, dropped to a crouch and trying to supress the urge to cough, looked around; scanning for danger.
Just as she had thought, she now found herself at the far end of the moonlit Dome, somewhere to the left of where she had encountered Wendy earlier that evening. Knowing it was foolish to be out in the open, Fran, darted away from the trolley and made for a patch of dark shadows to her right; slipping one of the large hooks from her belt loops as she ran. Coming to a stop by a large water barrel, she glanced back the way she had come and to the smoke house that at the moment was certainly living up to its name. For within the few minutes she had taken to check her surroundings the blaze had started to engulf not only the rest of the room but had also spread to the long wooden planters either side of the burning door. Even as she watched, sparks of burning foliage were lifted up by the warm air currents only to come down again a few metres away, igniting somewhere else; rapidly expanding the fire, one tiny glowing ember at a time.

  ‘I hope the whole fucking lot burns,’ she thought, watching as yet more of the precious crops became engulfed by the spreading fire. ‘Not that they’ll have to worry about food… for long,’ she said, a dark and cruel look in her eyes as she watched the crackling flames a moment longer before finally turning and slipping away between two of the raised growing beds.

  For Fran knew within the next hour or so, one by one, she would unburden the residents of White Oak of such earthly needs and when she had finished a new and insatiable hunger would bloom within each of them, consuming all that they ever were. For now she would tip the scale of fate against the living, she would lead the Dead to them or simply kill them herself; but either way she would make sure they knew it was her that had consigned them to their unending damnation. They had brought this hell upon themselves and if she had her way there would be no quick release from their torment. She wanted them to suffer, to know their fate and what awaited them. Only then as the seconds of their lives ticked away, filled with the horrific knowledge of what they were to become, could she say she had kept her word to Kai, Mike and Sam; only then could she allow this need for revenge that raged inside her to finally be replaced with the true and all-encompassing grief that she needed to truly mourn her loss.