Star Drawn Saga (Book 2): Lost Among The Dead by Stephen Charlick

over at Kai as she shook herself from her dark thoughts. ‘People were sent to these places, sent by people they trusted and they went willingly. They took their children, the people they loved, their families, they grabbed this meagre offer of hope to escape the horror spreading about them.’
    ‘And it always went to hell,’ Tom mumbled, watching the corpse of woman shuffle past.
    ‘They had no idea what they were up against… not in the beginning,’ sighed Fran, ‘or how to stop it spreading.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Kai, instinctively reaching out to take Fran’s hand to comfort her. ‘But w…why are they still here then?’
    ‘Hmm,’ agreed Tom, his eyes narrowing as he tried to figure out this deadly puzzle, ‘he’s got a point. From the looks of it, the gate to the camp is open,’ he continued, his whisper barely heard over the creaking of the moving cart as it rolled onward, ‘so there’s no reason they’d still be here… not after all this time.’
    ‘Oh, fuck!’ gasped Fran, her mouth agape as she looked at the large building only just coming into view; a large building with an equally large tree crashed though one of its walls. ‘That’s because they were in the Village hall... or were until recently.’
    Even as the whispered words fell from her lips they saw the emaciated corpse of what had once been a young woman claw her way through the rubble and wreckage to at last free herself of her unintentional prison.
    ‘Must have come down during last night’s storm,’ mused Tom, with a nod to the great fallen oak that had been violently uprooted; smashing though a side wall of the hall and part of the roof.
    ‘How l…long do you think they’ve b…been there?’ asked Kai, watching as the Dead woman finally stumbled beyond the broken bricks and smashed tiles to follow the channel of already trampled down grass down to the roadside and her Dead comrades that had gone before her.
    ‘Who knows,’ Tom replied, with a shrug, ‘but at a guess I’d say the Dead overran the refugee camp at some point and those that manage to escape, shut themselves in the Village Hall hoping to wait them out.’
    ‘Clearly not knowing that they’d brought death inside with them,’ added Fran, shaking her head at the needless waste of life; her fingers subconsciously tightening about Kai’s hand.
    ‘Looks like it,’ continued Tom, giving Star’s reins a brief tug to one side to guide her round two rusting cars and the wrecked remains of an army transport vehicle, ‘and… yes,’ he went on to say, craning his neck to get a look at the front of the recently damaged building, ‘yes, it looks like the front doors are still secure, probably still barricaded from the inside too. Those poor bastards simply couldn’t get out in time… they were doomed by their own fucking defences.’
    As Star pulled them level with the driveway leading up to the Village Hall, the Dead woman suddenly tripped and momentarily disappeared from view behind an overgrown bush. But as she shakily got to her feet again she gave testament to the full horror of what those trapped inside the hall had endured; for covering the grey rotting flesh of her arms, neck and face were multiple bite marks. It was clear more than one of these wounds had ripped vital veins or arteries from her body, causing her to rapidly bleed to death and then reanimate before her corpse could be consumed by her attackers.
    ‘Jesus,’ Fran whispered, imagining the horror that the trapped woman had gone through as the Dead had pounced upon her like a pack of starving hounds, their jaws tearing at her flesh and all the while her knowing there was no escape.
    Fran shook her head. She knew not dwell on the last horrific moments of these walking corpses she came across, no matter how exposed and blatant their tales were to see. For just when she thought she had conceived each possible nightmare in this world of the Dead, seen it present itself bloody and raw for