Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead by Stephen Charlick Page B

Vincenzo’s limp body up onto his lap. As he moved the body a violent spasm suddenly shot through the corpse causing the back of its head to smash painfully into Phil’s nose and knocking the knife from his hand.
    ‘Fuck!’ he said, already tasting his own blood as the corpse jolted again and again in his arms.
    ‘Jesus!’ Phil cried, struggling to get his arm under the moving corpse’s chin. ‘We’re too late… he’s already coming back,’
    Then as quickly as it had begun the moving stopped.
    ‘Phil,’ whispered Fran, her eyes widening in horror as she stared into the face of the corpse in his arms, ‘he’s…’
    But a low guttural growl suddenly cut off her words.
    ‘Shit!’ Phil managed to say before the corpse began to wildly thrash its limbs, desperate to get to the living flesh it knew was tantalisingly close, desperate to feed.
    With his arm under the corpse’s chin, Phil could at least keep the creature’s snapping jaws away from him but holding it at bay like this could only be a temporary solution.
    ‘Fran, the knife!’ he said through gritted teeth as he struggled to keep the manic cadaver in a headlock. ‘Get me the fucking knife!’
    Before he had even finished the words Fran was moving, running towards him with the scooped up knife flashing in her hand.
    ‘Pull him back!’ she shouted, leaping towards Phil.
    Doing as he was told, Phil leant backwards pulling the struggling corpse with him. Fran, barely slowing, jumped over the corpse’s wildly kicking legs and landed straddling his chest. With a scream of both grief and anger for what their lives had now become, she plunged the knife through the snapping mouth of the thing had been Vincenzo and thrust upward with as much strength as she could muster. Teeth shattered, flesh ripped and bone cracked but as Fran ‘grunted’ with effort the blade finally broke through the roof of the creature’s mouth to tear through up into the brain. With a brief ‘gagging’ sound, Vincenzo’s body rightfully became still, his limbs finally falling lifeless to the road.
    ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, reaching up to close his eyes, his lashes matted with his own blood.
    Then, as she yanked the knife free of his ruined mouth, two of his bottom teeth caught on the guard and broke under the force of her pull. For a second she looked at the bloody chips now lying on Vincenzo’s chin and dropping the knife by her side, she pushed herself up and walked back to the open hatch of the first cart.
    ‘Thanks,’ panted Phil, pushing Vincenzo’s lifeless body to one side. ‘You did good there…’
    ‘Good?’ She said, stopping to look blankly back at Phil. ‘Tell that to Carmella…’
    With that she climbed into the cart and closed the hatch behind her.
    ***
    ‘We’ve got a live one!’ shouted Michael, dropping to his knees by the burnt woman.
    ‘P…Please k… k… kill m…me…,’ the woman repeated, her tearful eyes begging for release from the pain.
    Wanting to console her, even if only to simply take her hand, Michael was at a loss to find a part of the poor woman free of burns and weeping raw blisters. It had been a miracle she had survived this long, her body was a mass of tortured flesh. She had been trapped from the waist down by the fallen debris that he saw blocked the rest of the corridor leading from the dining hall, much of which was still smouldering. Michael could only imagine what unbelievable pain she had endured over the last few hours; her suffering truly was the stuff of nightmares.
    ‘P…Please…’ she begged again, each breath a new torture to endure.
    Michael knew they had to do something to end this retched woman’s suffering but looking at the crowbar he held in his hand he doubted he had it in him to club her to death. Behind him he heard the shuffling of footsteps across the dining hall floorboards. Looking over his shoulder he was relieved to see Charlie and Liz appearing through the gloom. Like him they too now had