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

with a shrug of her shoulders.
    Waving her over, Tom nodded towards the road in front of them and more importantly to two specific walking corpses some twenty metres ahead; they were, or rather had once been, soldiers. Dressed in green camouflage fatigues now torn and stained dark with what had presumably been blood, the two Dead men were in a sorry state. The first, a young man when the Dead had claimed him, was missing an arm and his grey tinged bare chest had been stripped of much of the skin and muscle on one side, exposing the yellowing bones of his ribcage. His fellow conscript, on the other hand, had been older and seemed to be almost intact. That was until Fran studied him more closely and noticed the dark stain down one shoulder leading from the ragged flap where his right ear should have been.
    ‘Now, what are they doing here?’ Tom whispered, directly into Fran’s ear as she looked over his shoulder.
    Reaching for the folded map, Fran studied it and then shook her head, clearly bewildered as she handed it over to Kai.
    ‘Nothing,’ she whispered back, ‘no obvious army bases or anything... could be deserters, perhaps two men just trying to get home to their families and they didn’t make it?’
    ‘Hmm… I guess so,’ Tom muttered in reply, watching as the one armed soldier almost fell as it stumbled over the road’s frost-and-thaw damaged surface. ‘They’ve been dead for ages but I still don’t like it.’
    Of course when the Dead first came to blight humanity it wasn’t unheard of to find scattered soldiers, fleeing from the deadly wastelands that the cities had become, only to then reform hotchpotch squadrons to keep strategic positions and supply lines active. But unless there was something nearby that they were missing, neither Tom nor Fran could see anything on the map that would warrant a military presence here so far from any major town or anything of importance.
    ‘Look,’ whispered Kai, suddenly thrusting the folded map in front of Tom and Fran, his finger silently tracing a line up and over onto the next folded section.
    ‘The river!’ sighed Fran, realising it should have been obvious.
    Not only did it lead to the coast and out into the English Channel but within four or so miles east it was crossed by a motorway leading north towards the larger towns beyond.
    ‘So we might be looking at what’s left of some type of fall back positon,’ whispered Tom, dropping his voice even lower as the Dead soldiers shuffled closer. ‘Perhaps a stop-off point before survivors tried to make a break for the coast or even an ad-hoc military base for supply runs back up the motorway to somewhere bigger.’
    ‘Hmm…’ agreed Fran, chewing on her lip as a thought formed in her head.
    ‘ What? ’ gestured Tom, not speaking aloud, now that the Dead were almost upon them.
    Pressing her lips close to his ear and cupping it with her hand to keep the sound escaping to a minimum Fran whispered her reply.
    ‘So why are their corpses still here after all this time,’ she began, pausing as the first Dead man ambled past Star and the front of their cart. ‘And if there was some sort of camp set up…’ she at last continued, watching the soldier’s cadaver pass them by, ‘where are the rest of them?’
    ***
    It wasn’t until they had made their way past the village sports field, the high chain-link fence still enclosing the flapping remains of a sea of weather-worn tents, that they began to get an idea of what had happened.
    ‘Oh, Christ!’ spat Tom, shaking his head as he looked at the row upon row of torn tents barely clinging to their metal framework. ‘A refugee camp.’
    ‘Why’s that a bad thing?’ asked Kai in a whisper, unsure why it would fill Tom with such dread.
    ‘They were death traps,’ Fran flatly replied, fighting the images of bloody carnage that played across her memory. ‘You were safe behind the stone walls of your school, you wouldn’t know,’ she continued, looking