Class Four: Those Who Survive (6 page)

Chapter Seven

“You clear, Nate?” Francis asked breathlessly. The sneaky peeks he’d taken over the railing into the building had merely added to the picture that they needed to get out of Dodge.

Sharpish.

The kid nodded slowly, his arms wrapped around his legs, held tight to his chest. “Good, let’s go.” Francis crept down the stairs.

Before he’d made it to the bottom, a chap with an arm missing, dressed in black with a blood-flecked mask lunged at him and tried to grab hold with his one remaining hand. Francis recoiled in time and the zombie head-butted a stanchion.

The baton swung and connected with the zombie’s head. The ballistic face mask repelled the blow with ease. The reverberations ran up Francis’ arm, through his funny bone and into his shoulder. A muffled growl signalled the walking cadaver’s displeasure and pawed at him again. It was easily dodged and Francis swung low, sending the attacker crumpling to the floor with a smack to the back of its knees.

With a small escape window open to him, he trotted to the front double doors. “Come on, kid, let’s—” He looked around to see a Nathan-shaped hole where he expected a child to be. He frantically looked around the dusty building. “Nathan!” he bellowed. A whimpering from above him was the kid’s locator beacon.

Francis ran to the bottom of the stairs, kneeing the rising masked zombie in the base of the skull as he made his way past. Sent back into the concrete, the zed’s one arm restarted the pain in the arse process of lifting himself off the floor again.

Between Francis at the bottom of the stairs and Nathan cowering at the top was a young slip of a man; tall, wiry, dressed in low-slung jeans which showed off his heavily stained undercrackers. A leather jacket covered a gore encrusted YOLO t-shirt and a baseball cap sat at a jaunty angle on his head.

Francis wanted to stove his head in even before noticing the tell-tale signs of reanimation. Black lumpy veins ran like industrial run-off rivers over his outstretched hands.

YOLO looked from Francis and then up to a smaller, yet more sumptuous, looking meal. Like a slinky in reverse, he clumped up the stairs with a regimented regularity. Francis bounded up the stairs and grabbed hold of the dead yoof by his pant elastic. With a side step and a mighty heave, he slung the zombie down the stairs. It landed face first, causing a number of teeth to chip and ping off across the floor. Its jeans, though, held firm, still showing off a band of gaudily stained pantaloons.

“I thought you were gonna follow the plan, Nate?” Francis said as he thundered up the staircase. Nathan was still in the egg position. Unblinking eyes stared straight through Francis’ sizeable frame and onto the wall beyond.

“Kid, hey kid. It’s alright. I’m here, come on, we have to go. Like now.”

Francis picked up Nathan. The kid’s body felt as if it was wrought from iron and incapable of suppleness. Only when he was cast over the shoulder did he relax and allow himself to fold over his saviour’s grasp. “Let’s roll, kid,” Francis whispered and turned around, ready to begin the descent.

“Balls.”

A congregation of now useless organ donors were milling around the base of the staircase. YOLO slapped a dead hand on the bannister and began to haul himself back up. Broken rows of gnashers chomped on thin air in anticipation. Behind him, it was now three deep, with more and more of the ravenous dead descending on them from seemingly never-ending hiding spots.

With a heavy sigh, Francis placed Nathan back onto the floor behind him. He instinctively readopted his sitting foetal position and thousand yard stare. Francis removed his rucksack and placed it next to the inert child. “Look after this, Nate,” he muttered.

In a mini re-enactment of the Battle of Thermopylae, Francis stood defiant at the top of the stairs, funnelling the dead towards him. At most he reckoned they could manage two abreast. White knuckles clenched the baton. He braced his legs like a baseball player and awaited the first of the zombie Persians.

“Molon labe,” he growled.

YOLO lumbered forwards and was met with a violent smack across the temple which rocked his skull against the collarbone. When he looked back, Francis could see that the frontal bone had cracked down the coronal suture, and had partially sheared off. The baseball cap stretched where the bones had separated like a door being kicked open. The force had torn the skin from the top of the nose down to the corner of his lip; an eye slipped through the hole and hung in his open mouth.

An autonomic response to seeing food in front of him, YOLO’s jaw chewed down and bit into his own ocular device. There followed a crunching sound as if a heavy foot had stood on a cockroach, making Francis’ gorge rise.

He swung again with a powerful backhand and the force knocked the zombie across to the bannister. A forceful meeting with the sole of his boot sent YOLO flying over the edge and crashing into the floor. The zed twitched twice and was then becalmed; a half bowl of skull weebled its way across the floor, followed by a tide of black and grey sludge.

The sense of victory was short-lived as doleful moans from below him brought him back to reality. “This is going to be a long day…” Francis readied himself again as a female zombie sous chef dragged her broken and twisted leg up the stairs towards him, with all the grace of a concrete laden milk float.

With four flat tyres.

And a penguin driving.

The sound from the back of the building made every single thing, living and dead, stop and turn in its direction. At first there was nothing. Just as the sound faded into memory, something wailed again.

COUGH, COUGH, COUGH.

“Fuck me, that’s gonna leave a mark. Mental note, find some motherfucking Lockets,” a man’s voice echoed out.

A robed figure staggered out of a back storeroom, holding a staff aloft. An atrophied zombie which had an arm tied to the floor by a length of frayed rope went to reach for him, mustering a less than scary ”Gahh.”

The figure stopped and brought the staff down with a quick flick of the wrist. The zombie’s head, down to its neck, split in two. Discoloured meat and built up fetid fluid spilled onto the floor.

Most of the undead host were now focused solely on the enigmatic stranger on the horizon. Sure it had more wrapping on it, but they were drawn to the sound like sailors to a siren’s song.

The man walked towards them, his weapon now held in one hand, the grey robe still covering his features.

So enraptured was Francis that he only saw the sous chef pounce at the last moment. He bobbed back and her momentum made her overreach. Francis took advantage of his good fortune with a vicious downward smash onto the back of her head. Her face bounced off the stairs, leaving chevron imprints on her necrotic skin. Her nose had been completely flattened and one of her eye sockets was cracked. Withered skin was folded inside the split, pulling her skin taut.

As she rose, he kicked her under the chin and sent her careening through the air. Her whirling backflip was ended as velocity faded and she collapsed to the floor in a mass of broken bone and ruptured tendons. She elicited a pathetic whimper and her unlife evaporated.

The undead horde advanced upon the now stationary figure. Francis checked the stairs, relieved he was finally bereft of zombie guests. He rested his elbows against the railing and prepared to watch the show.

“Nate, get up, get ready. We’ll make a move in a minute. This guy must have a death wish.” With no popcorn and odds of twenty to one against, he didn’t think it would last too long.

He was right.

The dead throng formed a loose semi-circle in front of the lone ranger. The grip on the staff had changed from the middle to one end; it looked like he was holding a giant sword. As the first of the gang made their move, Francis saw two things flash.

The first was a glint from either end of the staff; each a foot long beam of shimmering silvery light.

The second was as the man tilted his head back, and the robe rose enough to showcase a beaming smile.

In precisely one point three seconds, the staff had been pulled back behind the figure to shoulder height, and then swung round at full extension in a 360 degree rotation.

By the time he had returned to his starting position, what was left of the cognitive functions of the group had been extinguished. A crudely efficient mass lateral craniotomy was performed with breathless ease.

It was as though they all had their marionette strings cut at the same time. The zombies dropped like dominos around the man. He shook the end of the weapon to remove the cling-ons, regarded his handiwork, and then stepped over the dead-dead bodies towards a dumbfounded Francis.

Nathan, who had watched the massacre through the railings, looked up at Francis with a faceful of queries. “Wh—”

Francis raised a hand. “No questions, Nate. None. Let’s go see who this is. If things go bad, remember the doors are below us. Just run, okay? Follow me this time.” He glared at the child who swallowed his inquisitiveness for now and shadowed him down the stairs.

The staff was slung over the man’s back and held in place by a leather strap across his chest. He dusted his hands together and walked towards the man and boy. “No shit. It can’t be, can it?” he chuckled.

Francis stopped at the bottom of the stairs, shielding Nathan, who peeked from behind his protector’s legs. “Do I know you, slim?” he asked cautiously.

The figure continued on his path. Calloused hands reached up and pulled the hood down. “Alright Cissy.”

Chapter Eight

The fire crackled and spat, the wet wood resisting immolation as long as it could. Francis looked across at the now de-robed man and smiled. “Philip, so, how you been? Your brother okay? Did you find your folks? What are you doing here?”

Nathan looked up from his charred rat on a stick. “You ask lots of questions, Francis,” he said between smirking and chewing.

“We got to our parents, but it was too late. Mum’s dead and Dad, well, let’s say he’s on a tour of the culinary delights of those still breathing. Kinda why I’m out here to be honest.” Philip peeled strands of meat off the flash-cooked rodent.

“I’m sorry, slim. Seems like everyone has lost someone these days,” Francis offered, staring into the fire.

Philip nodded his thanks. “Jim is doing alright. He found Sophie, they’re doing okay. Probably the best thing that could’ve happened to their relationship was the dead coming back to life; they’ve never been happier.”

The wind picked up its howling, screeching through broken windows. Rain lashed the building like it was trying to scour it from the earth.

Philip lay dinner down on his robe. “As for me, well, I’m looking for someone.” He plunged a hand down his Palehorse t-shirt and pulled out a key on a chain, which he passed to Francis.

“A mad bird gave me this, told me that I had to find a place which it would open. As is the way with deranged crones and quests, the clue she gave me was a little on the cryptic side.” Philip warmed his hands against the heat kicking out from the blaze.

Francis turned the key over in his hand. It was a normal plain brass key. It looked more like a locker key than a normal front door one. Aside from a few nicks and scrapes, it had no symbols or writing on it. “What’s going to be there? When you find this place?” he asked, squinting at the object.

“Some
one
. I hope. They’re going to help train me to deal with the zombies. Sounds crazy, huh? Just…I’ve got something left to take care of, someone I need to see,” Philip replied. His eyes welled up before the moisture evaporated.

“Your dad?” Francis asked. Philip nodded. “Fair enough, pilgrim. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

“What about you two? You find Shortround here recently or what?” Philip pointed at Nathan who was wrestling with a stringy bit of rat tendon.

Francis huffed. “Well, he kinda fell into my care after his mum…came back. Was a few hours after I left you guys actually. I headed into town and…had some demons to deal with. I genuinely didn’t care if I lived or died, not after what happened.”

Philip poked the flaring embers. “What did happen, Franny?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. As I said, we’ve all lost people. My pops always said that your actions determine the person you are. That’s all I can do now, keep moving, keep Nathan here safe. I made a promise to that woman, I intend to uphold it, even if…” Francis trailed off.

“I know.” Philip patted Francis’ shoulder. “So, you guys keep moving? Never stay anywhere? Must be tough.”

Nathan piped up, “I just want to be able to read my comics somewhere, and have Francis read me a story without having to sit up a tree.”

“Why don’t you head over to Rhayader? We’ve set up a camp there, and it’s growing every day with new survivors. We have people going out now to find other survivors. We’ve even blagged a CB radio, and it’s helping to build up a network of all those who have survived,” Philip said, taking the proffered key and chain.

“Jim’s there, plus some other kids about his size,” Philip added.

Francis scratched his beard; morsels of cooked meat flicked through the air. “How far away is it? Would be good to have somewhere to call home after the past few months.”

Philip placed the chain round his neck and dropped the key down his t-shirt. “A couple of weeks walk, I reckon. Not much more than that. If you’ve got a map, I can show you the way? Point out a few places to stop at, if you need some respite.”

Francis pulled a chunk of meat from the stick with his teeth and rooted around his rucksack. He dropped the map onto the floor and opened it up, smoothing down the creases.

“Weird meeting you, Philip. Found your little survival guide earlier,” Francis quipped, searching the map for their current location.

Philip smiled. “That’s good. Crops up the damnedest of places I’ll tell ya. One of the pathfinders must’ve been round these parts. Glad it’s out there. Just hope it saves a few lives and brings people together. We’ll need everyone we can to take things back. Here ya go, Francisco.”

Francis battled with the map again as he sought to decrease it back to its pocket size form. “Thanks, slim. Gives us something to aim for. What do you reckon, Nate?”

The two men looked across to the sleeping child, whose eyelids flickered and limbs twitched. “Ha, guess we’re staying here for now. Let’s go secure the place, you big bastard,” Philip whispered.

Boots scuffed against the dusty concrete floor. Trails of viscous fluid led from the scene of the zombie cleansing to a collapsed pile of zombie Jenga. “So what are you looking for then, Philip?” Francis asked.

“A legend.”