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

  Pausing her internal conversation, Fran tilted her head against the narrow opening and heard the rhythmic sound of snoring coming from inside.

  ‘A way in... a way in…’ she thought to herself, trying the window to see if she could pry it open, all the while glancing back to the Dead getting ever closer. ‘Damn!’ she continued, realising she couldn’t squeeze her fingers though to reach the latch.

  It was then that she remembered how, unlike her, Kai had been able to see past that locked balcony door as something that needed to be smashed through and had resolved the problem by simply thinking to unbolt it.

  ‘Perhaps…’ she mused, desperately trying to push the painful memory from her thoughts while at the same time realising that no matter how long she had left in this world, Kai would always be a part of her.

  So, taking a leaf out of Kai’s book of practicality, Fran moved to the cabin’s front door and tried the handle.

  ‘Yes!’ she almost said aloud, when with a soft ‘click’ the handle turned, opening the door. ‘Idiots,’ she silently continued, realising that Grant and Bret Nash, in their misplaced over-confidence, had just made things a whole lot easier for her.

  Slowly pushing open the door, Fran found herself in a cabin similar to the one she and Kai had been given; except this one was very untidy, littered with all manner of odds and ends, and the cold air had a definite mix of sex and pungent body odour to it. To her left was an open bedroom door and with the sound of snoring originating from inside she knew she had found the next victims that would be sacrificed to the fire of her vengeance.

  ‘Three and four,’ she coldly tallied, knowing that Dennis had been her second.

  For a moment she stood there, staring into the darkness of the bedroom, wondering how she should play this one out; wondering if she could kill one of them in their sleep before the other awoke and challenged her. That was until she heard the creaking of boards and the thunder of footsteps coming from behind her.

  ‘Shit!’ she spat, instantly regretting vocalising her comment as she turned to see Dennis’s corpse, bloody, torn and with much of the flesh stripped from one side of his face, charging across one of the moonlit walkways; following the lead of the slower cadavers in front of it as they closed in on her. ‘Shit, shit, shit…’ she silently continued, her mind scrabbling for an idea; any idea that could get her out of the deadly situation she now found herself in.

  Instinctively reaching for the door handle to shut out the Dead, if only momentarily, Fran almost missed the one small thing that offered her a chance to both claim her revenge on the two sleeping men while at the same time escaping with her life intact; for there in the shadows beneath the handle, still in its lock, was the door key.

  ‘Yes!’ she muttered, slipping the key into her free hand before pulling open the door again to purposefully expose herself. ‘Come on… come on… you bastards…’ she silently goaded, urging the Dead to hurry along the walkway; Dennis’ still agile corpse pushing its way past its more decrepit brethren in its haste to get to her. ‘Come on… you’re almost there, you sack of shit!’ she continued, watching as Dennis’ cadaver broke ahead of the shambling pack to reach the edge of the decking just a few metres away from her.

  Seeing the damage that the Dead had done, the skin and muscle that they had eagerly torn from his neck and face to stuff into their blackened gaping maws, Fran almost felt a twinge of pity for this fresh and fast moving corpse; but then as she looked into what was left of its face and saw nothing but the pale lifeless face of the man she loved lying dead in her arms, she knew Dennis had deserved this; they all did. So making sure the Dead man held her in its hungry glare right up until the last moment, Fran abruptly stepped back, closing the door on him only to immediately reopen it again fully; this time with her hidden, unseen against the wall behind it.

  With her heart hammering loudly against her ribs, Fran pressed herself as close to the wall as she could and shrouded in the shadows, watched as the thing that had once been Dennis charged into the room, its head snapping back and forth desperate to locate the source of warm flesh it had seen only moments before.

  ‘Go on… notice them… can’t you hear them snoring… go on,’ she silently willed, her eyes following a thick dribble of bloody drool falling from the Dead man’s ruined lips; while behind it, three more of the hungry corpses slowly ambled into the room, their desperate moaning soon joined by a forth and then a fifth. ‘Fucking notice them, you Dead pricks!’ she continued to pray, her hand tightening about the handle of the machete; fearful that any second one of them would turn and notice her.

  And then almost as if it had heard her silent plea, the agile corpse that had been Dennis slowed its frantic movements; its head tilting slightly to one side.

  ‘Yes… that’s right,’ urged Fran, noticing the way Dennis’ cadaver slowly turned to face the open bedroom door; it’s unholy interest piqued by the sounds coming from within.

  ‘What the…’ Fran suddenly heard a sleepy male voice ask the intruded darkness, his slumber disturbed by the moaning of the Dead.

  With the very sound of his words acting like wildfire to the Dead in the room, whipping them into a new and urgent frenzy, Dennis’ corpse bolted forward; throwing itself through the open doorway, into the darkness beyond and the promise to feed.

  ‘Jesus fuck!’ cried one of the Nash brothers, instantly waking his sibling with a startled cry that abruptly grew in volume and terror, suddenly becoming something wet and raw.

  With a crash and the unexpected sound of a woman screaming, Fran realised she would soon add another tally to her total; for clearly Norma had been persuaded to stay the night and as the other five cadavers followed their freshly risen brother to his newly found dinner table she knew she would not have to wait long.

  ‘Not yet… not yet…’ Fran kept telling herself, knowing there were more of the Dead just outside the front door; each of them desperate to share in the bloody feast being laid out for them in the bedroom.

  Even as she forced herself to hold her positon another corpse, a Dead man with little more than a gaping hole where his stomach and internal organs should be, shuffled awkwardly past her; drawn to the screams of the living. Just at that moment Bret Nash briefly appeared in the doorway, bloody and struggling to free himself of two cadavers that had latched onto him and in that instant Fran knew it was her time to move.

  Stepping from the shadows behind the door, her machete held aloft and ready to strike, Fran locked eyes with the terrified young man.

  ‘Help me!’ he begged, his eyes wide with horror while Norma tried to push her way past him; her face a mask of pure terror and panic.

  But any help that Fran could have offered, should she have chosen to, would have been wasted for no sooner had the man’s frantic plea left his lips than one of the hungry corpses took a bite out of his left arm, ripping free the chunk of flesh with such savage necessity that it flayed the skin from the man’s bicep almost down to the elbow.

  ‘Aarrgghh!’ Bret screamed, manically punching the corpse of a Dead woman with his flesh in its mouth squarely in the face over and over again even as yet another of the Dead clamped its jaws onto the back of his neck; the unbelievable pain causing him to stumble backwards into the room.

  Seeing her chance, Norma hysterically clawed her way across the floor, praying that she go unnoticed by the Dead, but in her blind panic and desperation to leave the carnage and bloodshed behind her she didn’t see the cadaver of the Dead man in front of her; not until she literally collided with it.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, her voice cracking. ‘Please…’ she managed to croak just as the Dead man fell upon her, his mouth agape, his blackened tongue snaking beyond his torn lips, eager to taste her blood so warm and so full of life. ‘P… please… help… pl…’ she finally gargled, her mouth filling with blood as the Dead man clamped his teeth about her lips in some dark parody of lover’s kiss.

  If Norma managed to say anything more beyond th
ese dying words, Fran didn’t hear it for already she was slipping round the door, her machete deftly cutting down the corpse of a teenage girl standing in her way.

  ‘Door!’ her mind screamed, as soon as the Dead teenager’s body fell headless and lifeless to the decking at her feet.

  Stepping over the fallen body, Fran reached quickly back for the door handle; the all-important key in her hand already fumbling into the lock. For a split second before she pulled the door closed she glanced back into the blood drenched cabin and into Norma’s wild eyes staring back at her, glassy with shock. Whether the woman in her catatonic state was beyond feeling pain, Fran had no idea, but as the Dead man kneeling over her tore into the flesh of her face Fran simply closed the door on the this horrific scene, knowing that justice had been done.

  ‘Five,’ she muttered to herself, twisting the key to lock the door; the soft ‘click’ only just audible over the chilling chorus of the Dead filling the night air.

  Then, knowing her work was far from done, Fran turned, ducked under the outstretched arms of an emaciated Dead man whose face had become a bloom of black and green mould, and then darted back along the suspended walkway, hacking and shoving corpses out of her way as she went.

  ***

  Sidney Murray stood in the cold darkness of his bedroom peering out from behind a set of curtains to the forest beyond.

  ‘We brought this on ourselves,’ he mumbled to himself, noticing the soft golden glow in the air off to the north and instinctively knowing that the Dome was ablaze. ‘They really thought they could just go on like this…’ he went on to think, wearily letting the curtain fall back into place. ‘It never occurred to them that they might meet someone who’d fight back… fight back and beat them.’

  With a sigh Sid made his way through his bedroom and into the small living room in which he housed his collection of books.

  ‘No one to write them, no one to read them… not anymore,’ he said, picking up his well-worn copy of Nicholas Nickleby from the pile on the table; a sad smile on his lips as his hands moved back and forth across its hard cover, welcoming its touch like that of an old friend.

  Briefly lifting the book to his chin, Sid closed his eyes and breathed in the familiar smell of dust and old paper. With it came a thousand happy memories; memories of life that no longer existed, of a man that ceased to be. With his smile slowly fading, Sid carefully replaced the book back onto the pile, his movements slow and measured, as if the item was something precious and rare.

  ‘Man may survive…’ he finally muttered after a pause, his fingers tentatively touching the cover once more. ‘But what about our humanity?’ he finished, his words at last trailing off as his hand moved from the pile of books to the crowbar resting beside them. ‘The price we pay…’ he continued with a soft bitter laugh, shaking his head as he held up the bar of metal; examining the object in the moonlight like it was something alien in his grasp.

  It was just as he was turning to walk to the door that the first screams echoed from somewhere out in the darkness, chilling his blood and twisting his insides with a terrible fear.

  ‘Natalie!’ Sidney instantly thought, fearful for the fragile younger woman that occupied the tree house one walkway away from his own.

  Breaking into a run, Sid bolted for the door; yanking it open with such force that he didn’t even give himself enough time to step aside.

  ‘Damn!’ he hissed, knowing the resulting collision with his shoulder was likely to leave a bruise come the morning, should he live that long; for despite the unexpected jolt of pain distracting him, he immediately realised the air was alive with the dull and ominous moaning of the Dead.

  He had barely set foot beyond the doorframe when a small figure dressed in a flapping dressing gown suddenly appeared from the shadows. Running at full tilt, her head turned backwards looking over her shoulder at something on the walkway behind her, the woman didn’t see Sidney until she ploughed into him; the resulting collision causing her to scream hysterically as imagined teeth tore into her.

  ‘Jesus, Nat!’ he gasped, aware he had instinctively drawn back the crowbar to strike her. ‘Nat... Natalie… it’s me,’ he continued, grabbing hold of the uncontrollably weeping woman; desperate to calm her, ‘it’s Sidney... it’s me… you’re okay... you’re okay, Natalie.’

  ‘Sid,’ Natalie managed to choke back between her sobs, frantically looking from him back to the suspended bridge, her face contorted with fear. ‘Oh, Sidney… we… we need to get inside… we need to hide… we need to get inside… please,’ she continued, her small hands like claws digging into him; her frantic desperation taking control of her, ‘please, we need to hide.’

  ‘Natalie, calm down…Natalie… Natalie!’ he finally had to shout, giving her a shake to focus her attention on him. ‘What’s happened? Natalie, do… do you know what’s happening?’ he went on to ask, locking her wild eyes with his. ‘Who was it that screamed?’

  ‘The ramp must be down,’ she babbled, ignoring his questions, as she looked back over her shoulder again, ‘the Dead… the Dead are on the walkways… My God, Sid, they’re up here with us… we…we need to get inside.’

  ‘So Fran and Kai found out about that poor young couple and their baby,’ muttered Sid, following the woman’s line of sight back along the moonlit suspended bridge as he manoeuvred her to stand behind him.

  ‘No… not Kai,’ Natalie simply replied, clinging onto the doorframe as if without its support her whole world would collapse.

  ‘Why? What do you mean, not Kai?’ asked Sidney, briefly looking back at her; a confused look on his face.

  ‘I… I heard Emma and Dennis talking in the Hub when I was helping prepare dinner earlier,’ she began, reaching for Sidney’s arm, still hopeful to pull him over the threshold and into the meagre safety that the cabin offered them, ‘I don’t think they knew I was even there… they… they said…’ she continued, her eyes flitting past him to the bridge once again; this time the four figures she now saw there causing her words to come out as little more than a strangle cry. ‘Arrgghh!’

  ‘Oh… Damn… I had hoped they got away in time… so… so our downfall is a woman scorned,’ thought Sid, referring to Fran as she shoved Natalie further into the room; blocking the doorway as best he could with his far from bulky frame. ‘We deserve this… all of us,’ he went on to say, talking to himself as he watched the Dead, slow, steady and forever untiring in their pursuit, amble across the bridge. ‘We sacrificed too much to save our own sorry selves… we could have stopped them… we should have at least tried… God… it… it didn’t have to be this way…’

  ‘Shut the door, shut the door!’ wailed Natalie, frantically pulling on Sid’s arm. ‘Please, Sid, get inside…’

  ‘It’s no use!’ he replied, angrily tugging his arm free of her fevered grasp. ‘There’s nowhere left to run, Natalie. We’re too high up to jump without breaking something… we’d be trapped in there and they’d get in, Natalie… they always do,’ he continued, his words prophetic in their dark truth. ‘You stay back… find something to arm yourself with… I’ll… I’ll keep them back as best I can and… and we only shut ourselves in as a last resort.’

  Even in the short time he had taken to tell Natalie of his pitiful plan, the Dead had made their own progress. Already three of the cadavers, two Dead men and a bedraggled looking corpse of a child in its early teens, had made their way partly across the bridge; while the forth, a Dead woman with a particularly badly savaged leg, lagged further behind, still barely a few metres from the start.

  ‘Natalie, you’ve got less than twenty seconds to find something,’ said Sid, his eyes darting back to the first Dead man slightly ahead of the pack, ‘a knife… anything… just…’

  He was about to say more when another figure appeared in the shadows at the far end of the bridge, its lithe movements and steady gait signally it out as one the living. Pausing briefly, watching the progress of the Dead across the bridge, the figure then step
ped up to the two support posts and into a pool of silvery moonlight; it was Fran. For a moment she simply stared at him, her eyes burning with a cold hatred that bathed him in shame and remorse.

  ‘I’m… I’m sorry, Fran,’ he called out to her, his shaking voice exciting the approaching Dead even further. ‘I… I tried to warn you… I tried to get you to leave.’

  ‘Not hard enough!’ she shouted back, her words like ice cutting him down through to his soul.

  ‘Please… Fran, I… I tried…’ he replied wearily, begging for her help; his eyes flitting to the first of the Dead now only a few metres from the edge of his decking. ‘Please…’

  Fran silently stared back at him, her eyes moving only once to see Natalie cowering in the open doorway behind him. Then without word or comment, she lifted her arm high behind her, the machete in her hand glinting in the moonlight, and then with a final glance at Sidney, her expression now blank and unreadable, she let her arm fall. With a dull ‘thud’ the blade struck the support post to her left, severing one of the thick guide ropes with one strike and making the bridge tilt suddenly to one side. Almost immediately the Dead woman fell from sight, her damaged body unable to keep balance on the uneven surface; sending her plummeting to the forest floor below. Then, almost without pause, Fran’s machete was flashing through the air once more, this time cutting free the bottom rope. With a ‘twang’ the tension in the support rope was released, forcing the wooden boards to hang limp and unusable for most of the way across; and instantly sending one of the Dead men tumbling away into the darkness. The Dead child, after a brief and awkward stumble, also lost its footing and with gravity talking control of its emaciated limbs, it too slipped from the walkway. Unfortunately and purely by chance, one of its legs got caught amid the now loose hanging ropes, leaving the confused corpse dangling upside down, its arms waving about; its decaying brain unable to comprehend its sudden change in perspective.