Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel Page 3

  ‘Whoa… whoa there, girl,’ hushed Fran, taking hold of Star’s bridle trying to stop the beast bucking her head.

  As Fran wrapped her fingers around one of the leather straps the mutilated Dead man at her feet began to moan and paw pathetically at her calf and thigh. With a sneer of revulsion spreading across her face, Fran took a small step back hoping to get beyond his cadaverous reach. Unfortunately this only seemed to make the corpse double his efforts and with each lurching movement his shattered rib cage scrapped worryingly against Star’s fetlock.

  ‘Shit!’ Fran spat, noticing the small cuts Star had already received from rubbing against the shards of broken bone.

  She knew if Star was to become lame or get an infection the situation for her human passengers would certainly take a turn for the worse but this aside, Fran liked the steady mare and definitely wouldn’t want to see her in pain or injured.

  ‘Now, hold still, girl,’ she said through gritted teeth as she struggled with the bridle to keep Star from moving.

  The second Star momentarily paused, Fran took her chance and stamped down hard with the heel of her boot. Despite the sickening ‘thud’ as the corpse’s head connected with the road surface, Fran knew the blow didn’t have a chance of finishing the Dead man but then that hadn’t been the aim. With the man’s shoulders now flat against the road, she stamped down again, this time aiming for his withered neck. Again she heard the cracking of bone as the fragile vertebrae pinned beneath her boot ground together and fractured. With the creature’s head now held securely in place by her foot, she bent down and with a single stab to the temple her blade gave the Dead man the eternal peace denied him.

  Almost instantly Star began to calm down again, simply showing her displeasure now through agitated snorts.

  ‘Now to get you out of this,’ said Fran, glancing up into one of Star’s large dark eyes.

  For a moment she examined the lifeless corpse’s ruined body, trying to think of the best way to extricate Star’s hoof from its shattered ribcage. In the end she decided it was probably quickest to simply pull the broken ribs a little further apart to make the hole wide enough to just pull the hoof free. She was just about to reach forward to grab hold of the broken bone and torn decaying flesh when she noticed the small scratches and scrapes from the blackberry bush crisscrossing across her right hand.

  ‘Fuck,’ she mumbled to herself, pulling free the pair of thick canvas gloves she had tucked into the back of her trousers, ‘getting careless, Francesca…’

  Wincing as the rough fabric brushed across the scratches on her hand, Fran berated herself for being so stupid. A second’s lapse in concentration and she could have found herself trying to fight off the million and one bacterial or viral infections that the putrid flesh of the decaying cadaver surely carried. She may not have been able to contract whatever transformed the living into one of the Dead, after all that could only be contracted through a bite and could take anything from a few hours to a few days to take hold, but nonetheless there were plenty of other opportunistic nasties out there just waiting to infect you.

  ‘Careless,’ she repeated, roughly tugging on the other glove.

  ‘Now,’ she continued, moving her now protected hands from one position to the next.

  Once she was satisfied on her grip she yanked the already gaping ribs further apart with a sharp tug. Try as she might to ignore the wet cracking sound of broken bones shifting, Fran couldn’t help but take notice of the unbelievable rancid odour that rushed up from the exposed rotting flesh within.

  ‘Christ!’ she coughed, only just resisting the urge to gag as she quickly turned her face away.

  Blinking away the tears that stung her eyes, Fran pulled herself together and went back to the task of releasing Star’s trapped hoof. Within seconds and almost as if on cue, Star raised her front leg, slipping it free of the putrid mess she had stepping into.

  ‘There you go,’ said Fran, wiping the worst of the gore from the poor beast’s leg.

  It was only when Fran grabbed hold the carcass to pull it over to the side of the road that she noticed that the legs of the Dead man had been reduced to little more than gnawed bone clothed in a tatter of denim rags.

  ‘Well that explains that then,’ she mumbled to herself, tossing the raggedy collection of lifeless bones to its final resting place at the base of a large hawthorn bush.

  With no leg muscles to support him, the pathetic cadaver must have clawed its way along the road, hand over fist, until it unfortunately found itself right in front of Star and her crashing hooves.

  ‘Right, let’s get you cleaned up,’ murmured Fran, giving Star’s thick muscular neck a friendly pat as she walked past her to the cart.

  Pulling off her gloves, she slapped them repeatedly against the side of the cart one at a time in an attempt to remove the worst of the stinking gore still clinging to them. Only once she was satisfied they were as clean as she could get them did she jamb them back into her waistband and open the hatch in front of her.

  Their cart, much like all others she had come across since the Dead arrived to happily knock Man from the top of the food chain, was basically a box on wheels. Made from planks of wood, the walls and the flat roof each had an access hatch built into it that could be secured from the inside; while dotted seemingly randomly across the walls ‘spyholes’ with sliding covers had also been cut to allow the living to view the outside world undetected as they travelled. The only wall that did not have these spyholes was in fact the front one and, in contrast, this had a single thin horizontal channel cut into it. This ‘viewing slit’ not only enabled the driver to see where they were going while still hiding them from the Dead but also gave him access to the reins of the horse pulling them.

  After pulling open one of the side hatches, Fran climbed into the cart and started to pull aside a few of the spyhole covers, allowing more light into the dim interior to aid her search among their meagre belongs for something to clean up Star’s scrapes.

  ‘Now, where… are… you?’ Fran mumbled to herself, lifting up the hinged lid of a long box that served as one of the two benches running either side of the cart.

  Pushing aside weapons, clothes and what was left of their food supply, Fran at last found the plastic bottle she was looking for.

  ‘Just enough,’ she mused, shaking the bottle of bleach to hear the small amount of liquid sloshing inside. ‘And this… and… this… and this,’ she continued, quickly grabbing bottle of boiled water, a scrap of clean-ish looking fabric and a plastic container that had once been an ice cream tub.

  Jumping back out through the hatch, Fran made her way back to Star who had returned to her usual calm, patient self.

  ‘Now, this is going to sting a bit,’ she said, pouring some of the water into the plastic tub followed by a squirt of their precious thick bleach.

  Swishing the two liquids together with her fingers, Fran picked up the piece of cloth and making sure she held it in her hand with the scratches on it, dunked it in the bleach solution.

  ‘Ouch,’ she gasped as the sterilising liquid stung her cuts.

  ‘I hope you understand this is for your own good,’ she continued, wringing out the cloth and gingerly wiping down Star’s leg.

  At first Star showed no sign of distress, simply flaring her nostrils disapprovingly at the sharp acrid smell, but then as the wet cloth passed across her minor cuts and scrapes she began to buck her head and try to move away from Fran.

  ‘Shhh… I know… I know, Star,’ cooed Fran, trying her best to calm the agitated beast. ‘Shhh… almost done.’

  Once she was satisfied she had cleaned Star’s leg as best as she could, Fran stood and moved the tub of bleach water to one side.

  ‘I’m sorry, Girl,’ she whispered, laying her cheek against Star’s thick muscular neck as the mare continued to stamp her stinging leg in irritation.

  ‘Hey, what’s up with Star?’ asked Tom, appearing by the gate with a bulging sack of harvested fru
it hitched up onto his shoulders.

  ‘The old girl got herself some scrapes and cleaning her up stung a little, that’s all,’ Fran replied, softly patting Star’s muzzle, ‘but now we’re all friends against, aren’t we? Hey?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like she’s forgiven you just yet,’ said Tom, chuckling as he nodded to Star who was still clearly annoyed.

  ‘Chuck me an apple, will you,’ asked Fran, hoping it would go some way to ingratiate herself back into Star’s good books.

  With a grunt, Tom lowered the heavy sack from his shoulders down onto the road side of the gate before climbing over it himself.

  ‘Here,’ he said tossing a large apple to her.

  Catching it with one hand, Fran placed the apple by Star’s mouth and never one to forgo a meal when offered, she devoured it in two bites.

  ‘Can you give me another?’ said Fran, holding her empty palm up to Tom who had already brought the sack over. ‘And where’s Kai?’ she continued, suddenly realising the young man was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘There you go, old girl,’ said Tom, Patting Star’s nose as she held out a second apple from the sack.

  ‘Tom, where’s Kai?’ she repeated, guiltily wondering if the two men had actually come to blows after all.

  ‘What? Sorry,’ said Tom, giving Star one last friendly pat. ‘Oh, he’s just taking a shit, he’s…’

  ‘And you just let him wander off on his own?’ she interrupted, not sure just who she was angry at most; Tom for thinking it was okay to leave Kai on his own or Kai himself for being so reckless.

  ‘Man wanted some privacy…’ Tom began to reply, shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘Some privacy?’ she barked, throwing her arms up in exasperation. ‘Kai isn’t like us Tom, he’s barely been beyond the walls of his school in the last five years… all this is still new to him.’

  ‘Yeah but,’ Tom tried to say.

  ‘He’s likely to get his arse bitten off before his trousers reach his knees,’ she continued, cutting Tom off to stomp angrily past him back to the gate. ‘He may be a big bloke and could probably take care of himself in a fist fight with someone alive but… but you saw what happened earlier, bloody fool not only left his crowbar back in the cart but then climbed a tree rather than trying to outrun the Dead… rookie mistake Tom, and you know it.’

  ‘Come on, Fran, he’ll learn soon enough… let the man have a few minutes to himself!’ Tom called after her. ‘He’s not going to thank you for turning up midway through a crap.’

  At Tom’s statement Fran’s steps faulted slightly. Perhaps she was being too harsh on the man after all. By her own admission, Kai was new to this way of life and she herself remembered how difficult it had been for her to get used to stripping down when the need arose to wash in mixed company, let alone relieving yourself in front of someone else. But Fran knew there was simply no room in this world of the Dead for any outdated shyness; privacy was a luxury of the past, privacy could get you killed. So with her resolve returning, Fran began to climb back over the gate. She was just about to swing her legs over when she heard Kai’s stammering voice calling to her.

  ‘Y… you g…gonna give me a h…hand?’ he asked, appearing through the tree line further down the gravel track; a heavy looking sack over each shoulder.

  Somewhat relieved that the situation had resolved itself without her having to interrupt Kai answering his call of nature, Fran nodded, jumped from the gate and jogged to meet him halfway. She knew she would still have to broach the subject though and even as she approached him she tried to think of just how to phrase what she needed to say.

  ‘T… take this one,’ he gestured, easing the sack slowly off his right shoulder, ‘there’s p…plums in there too so g…go easy… d…don’t s…squash them.’

  ‘Got it,’ she replied, briefly opening the sack to look at a mound of the bright red and golden fruit.

  ‘Kai…’ she began, gently lifting the sack of precious fruit.

  ‘L…look I’m s…sorry about before,’ he cut in, his features suddenly scrunching up apologetically, ‘I sh…shouldn’t have gone off on one like that about T…Tom…. b…but he’s s…so unpre…predictable.’

  Fran turned to look up into Kai’s large dark eyes, so full of worry and concern for not only his own safety but clearly for hers too, that it almost made her want to drop her burden and pull him into a comforting hug. As far as life among the Dead was concerned, this twenty-one year old man was an innocent. His previous life had sheltered him from the terror filled realities they had all had to endure and she knew he had to learn fast if he wanted to survive; there was more than just rules about relieving himself she needed to tell him about.

  ‘Kai,’ she continued, knowing that mollycoddling him now simply to protect him from the realities of this new world he found himself in could only end badly for everyone and may even get him killed. ‘Kai, you’ve got to understand something… the old rules, they… they don’t apply anymore. You can’t judge people’s sanity or reliability by what used to be normal… not now, not anymore. Everyone you’re going to meet from now on, they’ve all had to survive their own horrors…they’ve all seen the most terrible things imaginable happen to people they loved and they’ve all had to come to terms with it in their own way. Some have become spiteful and full of anger; angry at the Dead or angry at other survivors for simply surviving when others didn’t. Some, like Tom, are wrestling with their inner demons, somehow keeping those they lost with them and only allowing their pain to surface when they can use it to their advantage… But everybody’s different, everybody’s found their own way to make sure they get can through to another day… Christ! Some people have even managed to find God in all this madness…’

  They had reached the gate again by this point and as she slowly lowered the sack to the ground with a ‘grunt’, she turned to Kai again.

  ‘Do… do you get what I’m saying?’ she asked, searching his face for understanding.

  Kai effortlessly lifted his sack of fruit over the gate and set it down the other side before looking back at Fran.

  ‘And w…what about you?’ he simply said. ‘What gets you through the d…day?’

  She thought for a moment, pondering just what it was that enabled her to go on without her own loss overwhelming her and then a single word formed in her head.

  ‘Hope,’ she softly said. ‘I’m one of the ones that cling to hope. Hope that the madness will end, hope that we’ll somehow beat the Dead, hope that we’ll meet up with our friends again and… and hope that tomorrow might just be a bit better than today.’

  Kai slowly nodded his head, whether in approval or understanding Fran could not tell but at least it was a start.

  ‘Right, that’s lesson one over with,’ she finally said, climbing over the gate. ‘Let’s get this lot into the cart.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, and j…just how many l…lessons are there?’ he asked, reaching down to pick up the sack Fran had been carrying.

  ‘Ooh… far too many to count, I’m afraid,’ she replied, shaking her head as a smile twitched at her lips. ‘But I’ll tell you this much, lessons two and three are: you never leave the safety of the cart unarmed and you’d better get used to going to the loo with an audience because from now on Tom’s your chaperone and you’re his.’

  ‘W…what!’ said Kai, unsure if Fran was pulling his leg or not.

  With an arch of Fran’s eyebrow, Kai had his answer and as he was struck with the horrifying realisation that she meant it, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘I see you’ve told him!’ laughed Tom, noticing the look on Kai’s face as he sauntered over to help with the harvested supplies.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he continued, slapping his hand on Kai’s shoulder, ‘you’ll get used to it… and hey, it’s better than the alternative.’

  ‘W…what’s the alt…alternative?’ asked Kai, giving Tom a wary sideways glance.

  ‘One of the Dead sneaking up on you to make a dinne
r out of your balls,’ Tom laughed, slapping Kai again, his dark humour doing little to ease Kai’s apprehension.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kai, the realisation just how much he had to learn only now beginning to sink in.

  ‘Come on,’ said Fran, seeing that Kai needed to come to terms with this new reality at his own pace, ‘let’s get this lot into the cart with the rest.’

  Hoping to get back on the move again soon, Fran picked up one of the heavy sacks in her arms and began to carry it over to the cart with a series of waddle like steps.

  ‘An… and who w…watches out for her?’ whispered Kai, watching Fran struggling with the weight in her arms.

  ‘Her?’ Tom replied, folding his arms. ‘Nothing sneaks up on her, living or Dead. She’s got some kick-ass moves that one. Her dad was some sort of martial arts instructor… she’s probably a black-belt in something or other… our Fran is one little lady that can take care of herself.’

  ‘She certainly can,’ Kai mumbled, effortlessly lifting the other sack back onto his shoulder to follow her.

  ‘So he doesn’t stammer all the time,’ Tom thought to himself, a knowing smile creeping across his face as he watched Kai help Fran lift her sack into the cart. ‘Interesting.’

  ***

  ‘And you really think we can’t get past it?’ whispered Fran, idly biting the nail of her thumb while she looked despondently through the viewing slit at the twisted wreckage of an overturned bus. ‘Could we pull it out of the way?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Tom replied, making sure to keep his voice low as he glanced back to Fran hovering anxiously by his left shoulder.

  ‘Shit,’ Fran hissed, slowly turning her nervous attention to her other thumb nail. ‘Any ideas?’

  They had left the orchard far behind them, its many branches still laden with fruit awaiting the next hungry traveller in need, and although throughout the morning they had made a steady progress, once they began to approach the coast they seemed to have been dogged with one problem after another. They had travelled along roads clogged with the abandoned detritus of a world no more; past small ruined cottages, their broken doors and shattered windows nothing but gaping mouths howling in testament to the horrors forced upon their once living occupants, and all the while the Dead had been with them. Their decaying shells, as savaged and as abandoned as the homes they once lived in, moved in slow tortuous movements along the streets. Down alleyways and through once lovingly tended gardens, now overgrown and choked with weeds, they dragged their torn and abused corpses. Forever onward, they ceaselessly placed one foot in front of the other, unaware of their surroundings until something sparked their interest; something warm, something alive, something that may just quench the hunger that burned like ice at the core of their very being.